From Russia With Love
by Genevastar
Summary: Chapter 13 - The End! I have taken a few small liberties with the order of some events in Series 7 Episode 1. I hope you will forgive me.
1. Chapter 1

_God, what __have__ I done? _Rosalind Myers stared through the cracked and grimy window at the desolate spectacle beyond. The Moscow sky was a filthy, metallic grey, the lumbering clouds smeared with the ever-present air pollution and heavy with rain. The highest floors of the endless ranks of crumbling Soviet-era tenement blocks stretched up to and were lost in the murk. What the original planners may have intended to be lush green lawns between the buildings had been converted by the weather and years of neglect into rutted seas of glutinous, sludgy mud criss-crossed by the footprints of those, like her, unlucky enough to be living in one of the blocks. The muted, mumbling growl of Moscow's traffic was like an ill-tempered animal lurking somewhere just over the horizon. Every few minutes a car alarm went off. Every vehicle in the city seemed to be equipped with the same one – a maddeningly repetitive melody of different types of police siren – and it had already begun to haunt Ros's dreams.

She turned away from the window and took her glass of tea back to bed, pulling the Russian excuse for a duvet – a thin quilt stuffed inside a sheet – around herself for warmth. Now that spring was allegedly approaching the always erratic heating system in the building seemed to be giving up the ghost altogether. She had quickly learned to recognise that the sight of steam - or even worse, water - issuing from the ugly, rusty heating pipes that crawled around the courtyard below like a steel tapeworm meant tepid radiators, damp bedclothes and evenings spent trying to keep warm by huddling next to the gas ring in the over-sized broom cupboard that passed for a kitchen in the one-room flat.

_Stop wallowing, Myers. You're bloody lucky to be here at all._ She had fled from London with the remnants of the Yalta organization and a vengeful CIA hot on her heels, with little other than the clothes she stood up in and the money and passport Adam Carter had given to her in Kensal Rise church. It had taken all her skill and experience to lose her pursuers, and even with it she had avoided capture in Paris by sheer chance and almost stopped a bullet in Vienna. After being on the run for almost two months and living hand to mouth on the streets among the dispossessed of three different European countries, she had finally obtained a false passport in Poland and managed to go to ground here, in the sordid, anonymous underbelly of a country in political turmoil and social upheaval.

She sipped the tea and closed her eyes. In many ways, it was the ideal bolt-hole. Russians were conditioned by years – _God, centuries, more like _– of oppression not to ask unnecessary questions or show curiosity about strangers. Her colouring and bone structure allowed her to pass for a Russian, and her passport, claiming her to be an ethnic Russian born in Riga of a Latvian mother and Russian father, accounted for her accent when speaking the language. Moscow was one of the most expensive cities in Europe, but Ros had carefully husbanded her funds and lived frugally, even now that she had a job. Mindful of the fact that she might need to run again, she kept the remaining money from Adam as an emergency reserve. She would never become rich from her position as a waitress in a seedy club, but it had its advantages. The proprietor wasn't interested enough in the law to comply with its formalities, so she had avoided getting enmeshed in the tentacles of the state bureaucracy. The pay was poor, but it just enabled her to pay for the roof over her head, and the club at least provided her with one decent meal a day. Most important to Ros, the job also kept her occupied, and although in almost any other circumstances she would have crossed the border, never mind the street, to avoid most of the clientele and many of her fellow-workers, the human contact brought at least some relief from her otherwise relentless isolation and the loneliness it caused. It also helped to limit the time available for the kind of self-recrimination and regrets into which she was sliding now.

_Stop it_! She angrily thrust the duvet aside, and crossed to the kitchen. It didn't take more than three strides; built to Soviet-era specifications, the room was tiny. Ros snorted. Biggest country on earth and the government had rationed out the kind of niggardly living space to its citizens that Battersea Dogs Home wouldn't be allowed to offer a stray Chihuahua.

She boiled up a couple of handfuls of _kasha_, sliced up a banana to make it taste like something, stirred in some _kefir, _and sat eating it while the water boiled for more tea. Russian food, as the _babushka_ who staffed the cloakroom at the club was forever telling her, might well be pure and healthy, but, Ros thought sardonically, there was probably a law on the statute books that prevented it from actually _tasting _of anything. Not that she _had_ to eat it; central Moscow these days was full of supermarkets stuffed to bursting with all the Western foods and condiments a newly-crowned _oligarkh_ could wish for, but Ros avoided them. They were too expensive for one thing, and she didn't like going into the centre of the city very often; rightly or wrongly, the risk of being recognised there seemed greater. It was twenty years since she had visited her father here when he was ambassador _en poste, _but she wasn't the only person in the world with a good memory for faces. And the centre of the city also meant the Lubyanka with the FSB's copious files on the intelligence services of the West, the Foreign Ministry, and the British and American embassies. Not to mention Western tourists. Ros knew that her best protection lay in the grubby, grey anonymity of these faceless, soulless _mikroraioni _populated by the _narod, _the ordinary Russian people who had been the largely unacknowledged worker ants of the Soviet system. She could never bring herself to think of the district as a suburb; the word was too evocative of all she had left behind.

_Stop thinking of it, Ros, for God's sake!_ She stabbed her spoon into the bowl and forced down another mouthful of food. Ros Myers had always had a gift for compartmentalizing. Things she didn't want to acknowledge were simply shut away in the deepest recesses of her mind and sealed there so that they couldn't disturb her concentration or trouble her thoughts. Irina Selesnikova wasn't quite so good at it. Since her arrival in Moscow Ros had been struggling to prevent herself from thinking back over the events that had brought her here. Being on the run had meant concentrating every minute of the day and night on surviving, and it had left no time for the luxury of memories or nostalgia. Even now 'Ros Myers' was little more than a shadow that she sometimes glimpsed in a car's wing mirror or in the window of a shop. Reality was Irina Selesnikova, the daughter of a dead factory worker, who worked her shift, took the crude jokes and insults of her customers in a timid silence, jostled her way home on the swarming, clanking Metro train and went hungry at the end of the month when her money ran out. But there were some days when Irina couldn't keep Ros as deeply buried as the rest of the world supposed her to be in Kensal Green. When she was elbowed aside by that other woman, the one who had clung to Adam Carter's hand in those last few minutes, desperate not to lose the man whom she had loved without ever being able to find the courage to tell him so. When Irina was serving watered-down champagne to a petty crook with more roubles than sense, she sometimes found herself looking into a pair of light blue eyes, and her heart would race until she pushed away the errant memory. The back of a head glimpsed across the crowded dance floor might make her catch her breath for a second until a drunken bawl for more drinks jerked her back to reality – _Irina's_ reality. Ros sometimes thought that life – if this, empty, meaningless, dreary grind through the days could be described as that – would be a lot easier if Adam Carter had been swarthy and dark-haired rather than blond and blue-eyed.

She was wondering wearily if she could face the goose-pimpling prospect of a shower under a trickle of barely-tepid water when she heard a sound from the direction of the narrow corridor leading to the flimsy, plywood front door. Instantly, Ros was on her feet, every nerve on alert. Silently, she moved back to the bed and eased the pistol she had obtained during her flight across Europe from under the sagging mattress. If – _when_ – she saw Adam Carter again, she would give him both barrels for not having had the sense to put one in her bag instead of a sweater the colour of goose turds and a pair of jeans the wrong size.

She advanced cautiously into the corridor, flicking the safety catch off the gun as she did so. The door lock wouldn't stop a determined granny with a darning needle, never mind the CIA, the FSB, or the shock troops of the Yalta group. Or, she thought grimly, anyone else. Her father might have been one of the leading lights of the British Diplomatic Service; he had also had 'friends' among the Russian mafia, and it was she who had been instrumental in putting him behind bars for twenty years. In theory, of course, none of them knew she was here. Ros Myers had never had much time for theories.

She waited tensely at the end of the corridor, aiming the gun straight at the front door, straining to sense movement or sound from outside. The silence was absolute – so absolute as to be suspect. There was always _some_ noise in the building – children shrieking, drunken arguments, bawling televisions or the throbbing pulse of Russian disco music, the inanity of which made its English equivalent sound like grand opera. Now she could hear her own breathing.

She was just about to move forward when an envelope slid under the inch-wide gap between the door and the cheap, curling linoleum, and she heard feet clattering down the stairwell outside. Ros stared at the envelope. It was a standard, cheap Russian one, but it was the one word written on it that pinned her where she stood. _ROS._

_Don't be fooled. _She looked back at the door, edged past the envelope and lifted the cover on the spy hole in the wood, the fingers of her right hand still clenched around the butt of the gun. The goldfish-bowl view of the landing showed nothing but stained, chipped yellow and black floor-tiles, a rotting wooden banister and the steel-reinforced door gunmetal-grey door of her marginally more affluent neighbour on the other side of the landing.

Ros let the cover drop and looked back at the envelope. It was a trick. A lure. A threat. She didn't know which, but it had to be one of them. No-one knew her real identity. And no-one who _did_ had any idea that Rosalind Myers, erstwhile Senior Case Officer in MI-5's Anti-Terrorist Section, was now Irina Selesnikova, waitress in the _Zolotoye Koltso_ nightclub in Moscow.

_Someone does, Ros._ Someone, somewhere, had pierced the shield of anonymity that Ros knew was her only, flimsy protection against the many people who wanted her as dead as that empty grave in Kensal Rise cemetery apparently proclaimed her to be. And whoever that someone was, they knew she wasn't in it.

With one eye still on the door, she squatted down and lifted the envelope. It was light, and it felt as if there was nothing more than paper in it. Of course, if the FSB had coated or contaminated it with something _a la Litvinenko, _she had already signed her own death warrant merely by touching it. She glared at it.

All right. _Sudba. _Fate. The one word with which the average Russian shrugged off everything life threw at him, from a minor domestic mishap to full-scale civil war. With a final glance towards the door, Ros put the gun on the floor, slid her finger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open.

She didn't recognise the handwriting. She _did_ know that the words hadn't been penned by a Russian. Even the best-educated Russian intelligence officers couldn't disguise the way they wrote in the Latin alphabet. The shape of the letters 'r' and 'l' were immediately recognisable to the trained eye. And then there was the ultimate giveaway. The capital I. Alwaysdotted. _Always_. And it wasn't. The note read '_Novodievichi._ _28__th__ March. 16.15. The Grim._' Ros turned the paper over. On the reverse side were scribbled the words '_you are my outstanding officer'._

_Bozhe moi. _Without even realizing it, Ros whispered the words in Russian rather than in English. None of those who might still be threatening her – not the CIA, not the FSB, not Yalta, nor her father could have used those words. They had significance for only two people in the world that Ros knew of – herself and Harry Pearce. The flimsy sheet of paper fluttered as her hand trembled, and for the first time since she had watched Adam Carter walk out of the church and out of her life, tears blurred her vision.

Impatiently, she wiped her eyes. _Don't you dare, Myers. Don't you bloody dare. _She read the message again. _The Grim. _The Grim Grom, Western diplomats had called him. Andrei Gromyko, the long-serving Soviet Foreign Minister, the man without a personality but with a survival instinct that had enabled him to stay in his plush office in the Ministry on Smolenskaya Ploschad while men less attuned to the vagaries of Soviet politics found themselves waving the flag of proletarian internationalism in the mountains of Tajikistan or the jungles of the Congo. He was buried among the great and the good in the cemetery at Novodievichi convent on the outskirts of the city.

28th March._ Three days from now._ Ros got to her feet, dazed, picked up the gun and the envelope and carried them back to the window. Nothing had changed outside. The billowing clouds were leaching a sullen, steady sleet onto the city. A young woman, her fuchsia pink raincoat a defiant challenge to the bleak greyness all around her, slithered and lurched across the mud towards the main road. A chill dampness seeped through the rotting window-frames and slid under Ros's bathrobe. Even as her body shivered in protest, Ros felt a tiny tendril of warmth tentatively uncurling deep inside. _You are my outstanding officer. _She looked back at the thin sheet of paper, incredulity still mingling with her surging emotion. God knows how they'd found her, but they had. She could almost feel Harry's hand gripping her own.

She looked at her watch. Arriving late at the club was guaranteed to earn Irina a good slapping; it had happened once before when Moscow's notorious traffic jams had held her up. It could also put her job in jeopardy. Cheap female labour grew on trees in Moscow; the poorer districts of the city were a hive of deserted wives, illegal immigrants and single mothers desperate for any job, however menial, to make ends meet. The battered, wheezing fridge in the kitchen was almost empty, and there was a week to go until the owner of the club made his usual contemptuous gesture of throwing her skimpy pay packet at her. Irina Selesnikova couldn't take the risk of losing her place. So Ros Myers would hold her tongue, play the cowed and grateful refugee, and count the hours until the 28th of March.

She turned her back on the street and headed for the Lilliputian-sized shower to see if the cockroaches would deign to share their domain with her.


	2. Chapter 2

Once Ros had reached her precarious refuge in Moscow, her years in the intelligence services had enabled her to cope reasonably well with the enormous adjustment she had to make to her new circumstances. Thanks to the nature of her work, she was no stranger to assuming a false identity and creating a persona other than her own. She was living illegally in a country that was intensely alien, and her survival depended largely on how convincing she could make that persona. But now she was no longer doing it merely for the duration of an operation where, if things became too dangerous, her superior officer would take the decision to pull her out and close it down. There was no limit set to the length of this 'operation', and that was what Ros feared the most. In her lowest moments, as she trudged home physically exhausted from a long shift, or queued in a stuffy _gastronom,_ trying to work out how much chewy, gristle-filled Russian sausage she could afford to buy, she would sometimes feel a claustrophobic panic suffocating her. It took all her resources of self-discipline to stifle the burgeoning scream at the thought that this was not only her present, but her future too; that this was all there was, and all there would ever be.

The astonishing, _incredible_ arrival of the note was her equivalent of someone tapping on the cell wall of a prisoner in solitary confinement. It was the hand Harry Pearce had tried to extend to her as Juliet Shaw jabbed the syringe into her neck, but freed of its restraints. It was reassurance that Rosalind Myers wasn't just an unwanted, slowly fading memory in a few minds far away. It offered the merest, distant, whispered hint of redemption.

As Ros discovered over the next three days, it also nudged ajar the mental doors she had worked so hard to keep tightly locked on her former life. Adam had instructed her to_ 'walk away and don't look back. Not ever.' _And she hadn't, because she knew that however harsh and uncaring the words seemed, he was right. Mourning what she had lost and yearning for what she could never have again would distract her, sap her strength, and expose her to the danger of making a possibly lethal mistake. So she had worked ruthlessly to suppress all that Ros Myers had been and everything she had once had. She had almost convinced herself that the woman had been nothing but a quirk of her imagination. But it had taken just five words on a scrap of paper to make a healthy dent in that conviction. Usually, the long, gruelling hours on her feet at the club meant that Ros would sleep like the dead, too tired to dream. Now she lay awake, digging her nails into her pillow in frustration, made restless by a physical longing for Adam that she couldn't control. When she eventually slept, it was Harry Pearce who joined her, circling round and round her like a shark, his eyes stripping the tattered remnants of her defences from her, the menace of his courteous tone more threatening than the barely-contained fury it concealed. She jerked awake, sweating and trembling, to his bellowed '_shut up!' _and scrabbled for the reassurance of the note that every tenet of intelligence protocol dictated that she should have already destroyed. _You are my outstanding officer._

In the end she got up earlier than she needed to, despite her tiredness, and prepared to make the trek to Novodievichi, which was on the other side of the city. When she had been an ambassador's teenage daughter, there had been so few private cars in Moscow that she had been able to jaywalk nonchalantly across its broad eight-lane avenues. These days the city's traffic jams were legendary, and the possibility of endless delays had to be factored into any journey. Besides, purchasing a car would have been beyond Irina's financial reach _and_ meant the kind of red tape and paperwork best avoided, so Ros used trams or the metro. Moscow's buses were ancient Soviet fossils, prone to breaking down, and often fell victim to the city's gridlock.

At least it wasn't either snowing or raining. Ros carefully opened the _fortochka_, the tiny opening in the corner of the window pane there to provide the minimal ventilation which was all the bitter cold of Russian winters allowed. The air temperature confirmed what the scudding clouds suggested – that despite the intermittent glimpses of feeble sunlight, a strong – and cold – wind was scouring the streets. Ros sighed, tugged on a pair of woollen stockings under her jeans, added several top layers, and finished her ensemble off with her padded coat, boots, a woollen ski cap and a shawl tied over the top of it. Other than the jeans and one cheap, but obviously Western-made sweater hidden from immediate view, everything she wore had been obtained from the street stalls around the nearby Dinamo football stadium. Several items were second-hand, bought from the _babushkas_ who stood, sometimes for hours, selling off whatever they could to supplement their meagre pensions. She glanced at her reflection in the mirror as she left the flat, and for a second, heard Adam's mocking laughter at her appearance. She slammed the door hard on both the flat, and the sound.

The nearest metro station, _Aeroport, _was on Leningrad Avenue, a fifteen-minute walk away through a maze of back streets and scrubby courtyards containing a few rusty swings and slides and populated by menacing-looking breeds of dog. Ros kept her head down to protect her eyes against the swirling dust, and tried to ignore the icy gusts slicing through her clothes. She slipped deftly through the crowds that always thronged the stalls and kiosks around the Metro station and headed for the platform. With impeccable Soviet logic, the station was nearly twenty miles from the nearest airport at Sheremyetyevo, and Ros couldn't help cynically wondering how many bewildered tourists had emerged from it over the years searching desperately for an aeroplane.

_At least it's warm,_ she thought gratefully, as the vertiginously steep wooden escalator plunged her swiftly downwards into the human anthill that was the Moscow Metro. That the air she was sharing with her fellow passengers was thick, foetid and probably germ-laden as well as warm, was a price worth paying.

She took a green line train South for the five stops to where she had to change. Moscow tourist guides understandably vaunted the speed and reliability of the Metro's service and boasted of the beauty of the station décor. What they _didn't _mention was the bouncy ride that turned Ros's already tense – and empty – stomach queasy, the clanking and rattling of the carriages, or the ear-splitting screech of wheels on rails that made conversation impossible. Still, that was an asset to her; it reinforced the travelling Muscovite's propensity for withdrawing into a grim, unapproachable silence, and meant that she could fade into her shabby clothes and into the background more easily.

As she changed to the red line at Okhotni Ryad, the stop nearest the Kremlin and a quarter of a mile from the Lubyanka, Ros kept her face blank and her demeanour humble, but she was conscious of adrenaline causing her heart to beat faster. This was dangerous territory. Already she could see Western tourists around her and hear English being spoken. It sounded almost like a foreign language to her; she had been thinking and speaking in nothing but Russian. Deliberately, she shut her ears to it, while uneasily registering the increased police presence. Armed, black-clad officers from the OMON riot police units lurked menacingly about in pairs, supplementing the regular militiamen. Ros thanked God, Russian Orthodox or otherwise, that she was blonde with green eyes. Terrorist attacks in Moscow meant that the police force, already not known for its racial tolerance, deemed dark eyes to be suspect automatically. A dark skin _guaranteed_ document checks and a search. One was taking place a few yards ahead of her. Ros averted her eyes, darted past, and hurried onwards to the southbound Red Line platform. In her haste, she skidded on the dusty marble steps and almost fell.

"Hey, careful, ma'am!" The voice, and its owner, who had grabbed her arm to steady her, was American. Ros span round and wrenched herself free from a tall young man in the tourist winter uniform of ski-jacket and jeans, topped off despite the weather with a baseball cap, worn – inevitably - backwards. "You OK?" He hesitated. "Speak English?"

Ros almost snapped, '_better than you by the sound of it'. _She glared at him, spat in Russian, 'This isn't your America. This is _our _country. You speak our language!" She heard, and ignored, the '_wow, friendly folks around here_' as she ran across the platform and jumped just in time into the train.

By the time it reached _Sportivnaya _station, she had developed a headache from a combination of hunger and tension, the latter not helped by two OMON officers who had come through the train scrutinizing the passengers. They hadn't given her more than a cursory glance, but by the time she re-emerged into the street, Ros's hands, shoved deep in her pockets, were shaking. She stopped at one of the kiosks behind the station and bought a _pirozhok,_ the nearest Russia had to a Cornish pasty. It was hideously greasy, and Ros didn't care to imagine what animal – assuming an animal was involved – the meat had come from, but it was hot, and eating it steadied her nerves as she walked along the street to Novodievichi convent and the adjoining cemetery. A glance at her watch told her she was early, so instead of going straight into the cemetery she bought a ticket for the convent, reflecting ironically that as a Russian citizen, Irina Selesnikova was paying a fifth of the price that would have been extorted from Rosalind Myers, visiting Englishwoman.

It was still early in the tourist season, and mid-week, so there were few people in the Cathedral of the Virgin of Smolensk. Ros crossed herself as she walked in, and bought two of the thin wax candles on sale in every Russian church. For a few moments she stood looking at the glorious iconostasis, drinking in its beauty, letting the quietness calm her. Mindful to stay in character, she then kissed the icon of the Virgin and one of Christ in Majesty, and left a candle in the stand in front of each. As she left, she noticed one of the officious little elderly women who seemed to inhabit every Russian church fussily putting her candle in a different holder. _Russia's babushkas. Never mind Ivan the Terrible and Vladimir Putin. They're the real law of the land. _Hastily, Ros suppressed a smile, bowed her head in respect and slipped back out into the grounds.

She skirted a group of chilled-looking French tourists being lectured on the history of the complex, and passed through the gate underneath the Church of the Transfiguration that led directly into the cemetery. Another few roubles secured her a plan of the graves. Ros checked her watch again. Twenty minutes to go. Again she could feel a tightness growing in her chest and, despite the chill, a trickle of perspiration under the bulky layers of clothes. In London, she would have thought of it as being alert and ready, but Irina had inherited Ros Myers's brutal honesty. She might be alert and ready, but her rapid pulse and the dryness in her mouth weren't signs of alertness; they were signs of fear.

_Moscow Rules. _Ros remembered Adam talking about them once. Well, there would never be a better place or time to apply them. Glancing alternately at the map and, apparently, at the graves around her, she moved deeper into the cemetery along its neat gravel paths, listening and watching surreptitiously for any activity that seemed out of the ordinary, and stopping occasionally to examine a stone or monument. Here, jumbled together in a charming Russian disorder, lay some of the country's greatest musicians, writers and artists – Rostropovich, Chekhov, Sergei Eisenstein – alongside military heroes, members of the Tsarist nobility, and those who had run the system that had overthrown them – the Khrushchevs, Yeltsins, and Gromykos. Ros knew that Kim Philby was buried somewhere here in a secluded, unadvertised grave. Had she the knowledge of its location and the time to spare, she would gladly have gone to spit on it.

_Time._ She turned quickly onto an intersecting path. There were a few more people in this part of the cemetery, but all the Russians were in couples or family groups, and none of them looked like a possible contact. Ros couldn't believe Harry would have risked sending her a message through a random Western tourist. She ducked to avoid a tree branch and saw Gromyko's grave ahead of her.

It was strikingly modern design for a man so conservative in every respect, she thought as she stood there, although the stone – black, red and grey polished granite – was more in character. The shape reminded her of the jagged edges of a glacier. Maybe that wasn't so wrong, either.

"He was a good man." A male voice spoke quietly next to her in Russian. "A fine representative of our country when it was strong." A fist clenched. "He was respected in the West. He made _us_ respected."

"Y - yes, he did. He was honest. Hard-working." Despite all her precautions Ros had been taken completely by surprise, and she had to fight to keep the quiver from her voice. She glanced to her right. The man was in his mid-twenties, red-haired, obviously Russian. He was holding a handful of single carnations. Now he smiled and held one out to her. "We should show _our_ respect. Don't you think?"

"Yes, we should." Ros was recovering. "Thank you. I – er – I should have … but the flowers are so expensive."

"Yes. Even death has a price in Russia now." There was bitterness in the young man's voice that she suspected was genuine. He gazed at the monument for a moment longer until a couple trailing two squealing and obviously very bored children had gone past, then, with a gesture so swift and discreet that Ros wasn't even sure she'd seen it, slipped something into the cheap plastic shopping bag she carried over her shoulder. "That is everything you need." His voice was a whisper. "Garry Peers says be careful. You are Rangefinder. I am Pyotr."

For a second Ros didn't recognise the Russified pronunciation of Harry's name. She stooped to lay the carnation across the base of Gromyko's grave. _He'll be turning somersaults in it if he can hear this conversation._

"How is he? How do you know him?" They weren't, strictly speaking, relevant or necessary questions. Ros knew that she shouldn't be prolonging contact, but this nondescript young Russian was a tangible link to Harry and everything that he meant to her. For an instant her longing to know _something_, however trivial, about him, over-rode the imperatives of her field training.

'Pyotr' laid his carnation next to hers. "He is fine, but he needs your help." A pause. "He knew my mother in Germany. Long ago. Good luck." He straightened and let his voice rise slightly. "Those good days will come again. _Tsarstvo vam nyebyesnoiye, Andrei Andreyevich."_

_God rest your soul._ Ros doubted Gromyko had had one, but she bowed her head, and looked up just in time to see the young Russian walking away down the path. She switched her bag to her left shoulder, and in doing so, felt the shape of something like a small packet in the bottom of it. A slight tremor rippled its way down her spine, partly because she had become cold from standing still, partly from apprehension about what a search by militia officers might find now.

_Pull your bloody self together! _she raged silently. She had been in the intelligence services for fifteen years. She had single-handedly kept herself safe throughout her flight across Europe. And why the hell would the police be interested in Irina Selesnikova anyway, impoverished, plain, downtrodden little mouse that she was?

_Do not be afraid!_ She started making her way towards the street exit, still walking casually and admiring the graves as she passed. _I shouldn't be, but I am. _She had to admit it. It was fear that was making her shiver as much as the chill, and fear that was urging her to run rather than stroll. This time she was _really_ out on a limb, without back-up or protection, surrounded by wolves in hostile territory. _I am. But_ _I wouldn't be afraid if you were with me. If I knew you were here somewhere._

The crunch of footsteps advancing rapidly on the gravel behind her made her turn. For a split second the glimpse of uniforms almost paralysed her. Then the two army officers pushed arrogantly past as if she were invisible, almost shoving her off the path. Irina cringed against the monument she had stumbled into, stammering an unheard apology. Ros watched them go, instinctively clutching her bag to her side.

_But you are. _She could feel the packet pressing against the thin, cheap padding of her coat. _You __are__ here. And they have no idea.  
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Irina Selesnikova brushed stone dust from her sleeves, hunched defensively into her coat and thrust her chilled hands into her pockets. Rosalind Myers allowed herself the luxury of shooting a freezing glare after the two officers and felt the small gesture of defiance ease her tension. _Harry needs your help._ She took a deep breath and headed briskly back towards the metro station.


	3. Chapter 3

It was almost seven in the evening by the time Ros got back to the flat after battling her way through the rush-hour crowds with her bag clutched protectively under her arm. She wanted to open the package at once, but for practical reasons, she forced herself to wait. She was on the night shift at ten, and more important, she was ravenously hungry.

She pulled off her outer garments – the ever-capricious heating was now working overtime, and the temperature rivalled that of a Russian steam bath – heated up some borscht and cut several slices of black bread. There were_ some_ things, she reflected, that the Russians did well, and these were two of them. As an afterthought, she prised two pickled cucumbers from a jar and put those on her plate too. There was a radio built into the kitchen, a holdover from Soviet times when government propaganda was served up with the breakfast _kasha_. Russian folk tunes were playing, and Ros found herself humming along to the ones she knew between mouthfuls. She smiled wryly. All that painful effort to close her mind to memories that her heart wanted against all common sense to preserve, and here she was with that troublesome bloody organ lighter than it had been since she fled from London. All because of a package a few inches square, contents unknown. _God, you're a soft idiot, Myers._

She almost choked on the soup. Thank God she hadn't uttered that thought out loud; it had come to her in English _and_ in the wrong identity. She forced her thoughts back into Russian. _You are Irina Selesnikova. Ros Myers does not exist._ It would be the supreme irony if she betrayed herself now. The unexpected contact from London had raised her spirits in a way that nothing else could have done, but it could also spell danger, and she needed to stay alert. Pyotr had told her that Harry needed her help, so she could be pretty certain the package didn't contain perfume and silk stockings.

She ate the last of the bread and, after a hesitation, poured herself a small glass of vodka. She couldn't help smiling as she remembered that Harry wouldn't touch the stuff, although he always protested vehemently that his objection to it was gastronomic rather than ideological. Potatoes, he maintained, should be boiled, roasted or fried. _Not _turned into alcohol. Well, he could afford to be choosy, with his favourite single malt always within reach. Ros had already learnt that in Russia you often had to make do with what was available.

She took out the package and opened it to reveal a small box bearing a picture of a mobile phone, and a postcard with a view of the Old Town in Riga. The message read _'Happy birthday! Hope you like the phone, Irochka. Stay in touch!'_ and was signed _Dyedya Vanya._ Ros's smile deepened. Millions of Russians must have had an Uncle Vanya, but it also happened to be her – and Harry's – favourite Chekhov play. For a second the words swam in front of her as a tiny piece of Thames House infiltrated the Moscow smog. Impatient with her own sentimentality, and knowing she had no time to indulge it now, Ros examined the phone carefully and noticed the 'message received' icon in the corner of the screen. She clicked the appropriate button, and lifted it to her ear. Harry's voice was crisp and authoritative. He might have been briefing her in his office rather than from thousands of miles away.

"_Rangefinder, there's been a notable increase in Russian intelligence activity here in the last few months – intensified industrial espionage, repeated attempts to hack secure computer systems, and Special Branch has evidence that FSB officers have been stirring up our mobile rent-a-mobs. And there's been a huge leap in heavily encrypted communications traffic between the embassy and Moscow. General consensus is that they're working up to something massive and that it could happen soon, but we haven't been able to pinpoint what.' _There was a pause. '_We have an asset in the Overseas Intelligence Directorate of the FSB who claims to know more, but he's in a very sensitive position. He's prepared to provide us with information, but only in Moscow, and he'll only communicate through dead drops, no face to face meetings. He'll make the first four days after you meet Pyotr - midday, at the Russian space shuttle model in Gorky Park. At each drop he'll let you know when and where his next one will be. Use this phone only to transmit crucial intelligence. We will contact you only in an emergency. And you're deniable. Absolutely. You're on your own, black op, no official back-up. Delete this message. _Another slight pause. _Be careful. I'm relying on you, Rangefinder. We need you.'_

Ros bit her lip very hard as the message ended, but two rogue tears escaped anyway. It was those last two sentences that did it. She sniffed hard and dried her eyes on her sleeve. _No help, no back-up._ _And no pressure then, Harry? _Even as she muttered the words she knew they were hypocritical. She didn't care how deniable she was. What mattered was what she _wasn't – _adrift, abandoned and alone. Not any more. Now she had a purpose; something meaningful to do, and a reason for doing it that wasn't just keeping herself safe without really knowing what for. At least for the moment, she was wanted and needed. She was an intelligence officer again.

_Then behave like one._ Decisively, Ros got to her feet. Irina was probably too insignificant to be subjected to a search at the club, but she lived so modestly that carrying a top of the range mobile might arouse curiosity. Ros looked around her, mentally rejecting all the obvious hiding places. The tiles in the bathroom were cracked and uneven in many places. Under the sink, one was inches from falling off completely, and the plaster behind it had partly crumbled too. Ros wrapped the phone in two thick plastic bags. Grimacing with distaste, she scraped out enough of the plaster to make space, wedged it in and pushed the tile back. Hanging crookedly over the gap, it looked just like any other imminent Russian plumbing disaster. Satisfied, Ros washed her hands and touched up her make-up. Irina's reflection looked different from the drab, downtrodden woman she had seen in the mirror a few hours ago. There was a tinge of colour in her face and liveliness in her eyes. Even her posture was more erect than it had been. Ros Myers was beginning to emerge from the shroud of Irina Selesnikova.

_And she mustn't. _Ros hurried to pull on her outer clothing, yanking her collar high and wrapping her shawl tight as if by doing so she could reverse the process. She heard the nine pm news jingle blaring from the TV in the flat opposite hers and broke into a run down the stairs.

She arrived at the club just before ten and hurried to change into her working clothes. Ros loathed the black satin dress, which she considered too tight, too short, and downright vulgar, and she tugged on her stilettos, for which she would willingly have exchanged the stocks, the rack, and any other instrument of torture you could name by the end of a shift, with even less enthusiasm. She was just pinning her hair up when her colleague came rushing in.

"Ira, _davai_! Come on, hurry up! Special guests tonight! Dima wants everything perfect!"

_So what else is new? _Ros looked round with Irina's habitual weary expression. "Stop tearing your hair out, Olya. What's happening?"

"There's a big private birthday party. Upstairs." The young woman, younger than Ros by about ten years and at least, Ros thought irritably, twenty years more naïve, bounced excitedly in front of the mirror.

"Who?" Ros asked.

Olga struck a pose and admired her reflection. "Big cheeses. _Chekisti." _She dropped her voice almost to a whisper on the last word.

_Chekisti. _The slang term every Russian used to describe officers of the FSB. Ros's fingers fumbled on her hair-clip and dropped it. She stooped to retrieve it, schooling her face to an expression of indifference.

"Yeah?" She forced a smile. "They'll be spoken for, Olyinka. No pickings for you there."

The younger woman pouted and returned to studying her own reflection.

_Coincidence. Nothing to worry about._ Moscow was bristling with intelligence and police officers of all shapes and sizes, and they had birthdays like anyone else. Ros knew she was good at counter-surveillance. She had seen no tail this afternoon. There was no reason for the FSB to have sent a welcoming committee to her workplace. _Coincidence, that's all._ She pressed her mental 'mute' button on the voice of her instructor at MI-6 intoning '_In the field there is safety and there is danger. There is no such thing as coincidence.'_

"_Ira!" _She jumped as Olga's glittering purple nails clawed into her arm. "Come _on_!"

Ros followed her to the private dining room on the first floor. As they reached the landing the padded door opened and the club's proprietor, Dima, barrelled out. He leered at Olga, looked Ros critically up and down, and then pinched her arm – hard.

"I told you, too thin. Customers don't want to be served by bloody skeletons."

Ros lowered her eyes and muttered the apology she knew he expected, even as her free hand itched to punch him on any one of his several available chins. "Get to work.." As she eased past him he slapped her on the rump. Irina shrank nervously against the wall even as Ros's muscles tensed with the effort to keep her rage in check. _One day, you bloody piece of pond scum. One day._

Her eyes watered as a haze of cigarette smoke assaulted them. A dozen men and, from the little she could see through the miasma, about six women, were seated around a table littered with the remains of the _zakuski _that preceded every Russian meal. Open bottles stood all over it like a disorganized infantry regiment. Four musicians were playing jazz in a corner. Olga was already eagerly diving in to clear the table, and Ros could see two of the unattached officers ogling as the younger woman leaned across it. She sighed inwardly and moved forward to join her, fixing an appropriately ingratiating smile on her face as she did so.

She had expected the shift from hell, and was surprised to find that despite the copious quantities of alcohol imbibed by the party during the endless stream of congratulatory toasts, most of the guests, while boisterous, remained fairly amenable. She had known some of Dima's 'special events' to end with the militia being called in. This time, from what she could observe from behind the mask of Irina's withdrawn timidity, the tone was being set by the birthday boy himself. Ros had noticed him quietly rebuking one of his colleagues for sliding his hand up Olga's skirt, and at one point he had smiled apologetically in her direction when another of the men, made clumsy by drink, had knocked over a bottle that had flooded its contents down the front of her skirt. Irina had stammered an embarrassed '_it doesn't matter'_ and scurried from the room to try and mop herself up, but she had been aware of the officer's watchful blue eyes following her.

_And it's the watchful that bothers me._ Once dessert and coffee had been served, she threw on her coat and followed Olga, who had already gone outside for a cigarette, out into the street. Her legs and back ached from the repeated trips up and down the stairs, and although the air struck cold, its sharpness was a blessed relief after the fug in the dining room. The lane's one street lamp wasn't working, and in the near darkness she almost fell over Olga, who was leaning against the wall, entwined in the arms of one of the younger, unaccompanied FSB officers. Ros walked a few paces the other way and stared towards the brighter glow of the main road where it led towards Pushkin Square. Obviously her young colleague didn't feel any reticence about getting cosy. Still, why should she? His uniform didn't inspire the same feelings of apprehension and fear in her as it did in Ros. Ignorance was bliss, and for Olga the officer would be a good catch – young, bright, with a well-paid job and the prospect of a good career. He could offer her a future, and at least, Ros thought with sudden bitterness, Olga - unlike her - actually had one. So why shouldn't she find someone to share it with?

_Oh, stop it, you self-pitying fool. _Ros glanced over her shoulder at the peal of Olga's laughter._ What the hell's making you so bloody maudlin all of a sudden? _She re-fastened the clip in her hair. _Tiredness, that's all it is. _She stamped her feet, which were getting cold. _Yeah, right. _Much as she wanted to believe that fatigue was the only reason for the melancholy suddenly coiling itself round her, Ros knew better. She hadn't been afraid as such during her time in Moscow, because for all the uncertainty of her situation, she had told herself that there was little to be afraid for. After all, most of what meant anything to her – Adam, her job, her family - she had long since already lost. But she _had _been desperately lonely, hiding behind a mask, constantly guarding her tongue and mentally questioning everything everyone around her said or did. Ros had never in her life picked up a man in the way Olga was doing now, but suddenly she found herself envying the easy, flirtatious way in which the young Russian could do it, and wishing that she could do the same … just to loosen the strait-jacket of her isolation, just for a while.

_Be honest,_ she chided herself. It wasn't just _any_ man she wanted. The message from London had brought Adam Carter out from the wings of her mind right back onto centre stage. It wasn't just the physical desire for him that kept her from sleep – Ros could have disciplined herself into subduing that. It was everything else they had had together that she missed – the shared passion for their work, their affectionate verbal sparring, even their arguments … all the strands that had been woven together into that wonderful companionship, so that while she had still been alone more often than not, she had never felt lonely.

_Damn you, that's enough!_ She walked quickly back down the street, almost twisting her ankle in an unseen pothole, and hurried back up to the dining room, where the birthday party was now breaking up. Irina's attempt to slip in unnoticed was thwarted by Dima, who broke off his conversation with the officer whose birthday it had been, and bellowed at her across the room.

"Where the hell have you been skiving, you lazy bitch?"

"I – I wasn't – I just went for some air ... I'm sorry." Irina fumbled her coat off and hastily threaded her way through the departing guests to clear the remaining dishes and glasses.

"Get your air on your own time! And get the bloody lead out! Where do you think you are – on the beach at Sochi? I don't pay you to laze around – what do you think I am?"

_You're an ignorant, mouthy slob, and one day I'll take great pleasure in telling you so straight to your fat, drunken face - preferably with my fist, to drive the point home. _Ros picked up a pile of plates, but as she turned her foot skidded on a patch of something slippery. Thrown off balance, she went sprawling head first in a cacophony of smashing crockery, almost taking one of the FSB officers with her.

She was already automatically cringing and apologising as Dima yanked her roughly to her feet, scraping her legs against the shards of broken plate and laddering her tights in the process.

"_Durochka! _You clumsy cow, that'll be docked out of your pay!" He gave her a shove that knocked her into the table. "Clear that mess up, you useless Balt!"

"Yes - yes … I – I'm sorry," Irina shrank away from him. "Sorry." She kicked off her other shoe and squatted awkwardly in her tight skirt, picking up the broken pieces, as Dima shouted for Olga.

"You're bleeding." Ros looked up at the voice and saw the FSB officer who had been watching her earlier, standing over her. He pointed at her leg. "And you're going to cut your feet as well in a minute."

"It – it's nothing." Irina managed to summon up a timid smile, although every nerve was flashing warning signals to Ros's brain. She swept the broken crockery into a heap. "My fault … it's nothing, honestly." She could feel his eyes following every movement she made.

"You need a broom," he said.

"I'll fetch one." _Anything to get out of your way._ Ros stood, but as she did, a wave of dizziness swept over her.

"Easy." His hand was on her arm. Ros wanted to pull away, but she allowed Irina to steady herself first. She looked up into a pair of smiling blue eyes, and as memories flooded back Ros felt the floor rock again.

"You're not having the best of evenings …? "

"Irina Alexeyevna." Ros swallowed; her throat felt as if someone had lined it with sandpaper, and her heart was racing far too fast.

"Bychkov, Alexander Kirillovich, at your service." He inclined his head. "You look a little faint, Irina Alexeyevna. Is anything wrong?" He was watching her closely, and Ros thought she heard a slight emphasis on her name.

_Yes. I don't trust you, and I need to get the bloody hell out of here. _She shook her head.

"No … thank you. I – I'm just tired. I - er - I need to get home, that's all."

"Allow me to take you." Before she could react, he had crossed to Dima and was speaking rapidly to him. Irina stood, wringing her hands anxiously even as Ros swiftly considered her skimpy menu of options. She could run, but if she did that she would turn Bychkov's attention – which might still be nothing more than a man's interest in an unattached woman - into suspicion. She could decline his company, which might anger him – or she could play along. Instinct urged '_run_'. Fifteen years in the Service said '_don't panic._'

The decision was taken from her as Bychkov returned.

"Yours, I believe?" He handed Ros the envelope containing the wages that she was certain that a scowling Dima had been intending not to pay her. "Perhaps you would care to change? My car is parked nearby, and Mr Latushkin has agreed that you can leave."

_I'll bet he has._ Ros had recognised the flashes on his uniform. Even Dima Latushkin, small-time crook and big-mouth bully, couldn't argue with a major in the FSB.

_And neither can Irina Selesnikova._ She swallowed, smiled shyly back at him, and went downstairs to change.

_Please do review - all opinion, positive and negative, is very welcome!_


	4. Chapter 4

Ros had visited Gorky Park before. Her father had taken her there in the depths of winter, when the city authorities flooded the network of paths and turned much of it into a giant skating rink. She could still hear the rasping swish of their blades as they glided among the ice-covered birch trees that used to sparkle like diamonds in the pale winter sun. It had seemed like something out of a fairy tale then.

_And you don't believe in fairy tales,_ she reminded herself sharply, e_specially not Russian ones. _They were always filled with monsters like Baba Yaga, and more often than not the children ended up getting eaten.

Irina purchased an entrance ticket and passed under the enormous columned gateway. Once it had been Moscow's impudent response to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, a pompous reminder of Soviet glories. Now it was a sad, dilapidated reminder of how they had ended. She picked her way through the puddles in the pot-holed asphalt. It had been raining earlier, but the sun was trying to penetrate the low cloud now. This kind of weather didn't show Moscow at its best – the humidity trapped the heavy pollution and Ros could taste the lead from thousands of gridlocked cars on her tongue – but it was still the weekend, and Russian families and tourists still thronged the park. She bought an ice-cream and began to stroll. The Russian copycat space shuttle, '_Buran', _that Ros had always considered a monumental tribute to the art of industrial espionage, stood near the river embankment wall. For the moment, she avoided it. She hadn't seen or sensed any surveillance on her since leaving the flat, but Alexander Bychkov was still very much present in her mind, and she wanted to know beyond any doubt that she was clean _before _she went to the drop.

She sat on a bench near a rather battered carousel and ate the ice-cream, watching as surreptitiously as she could for anyone stopping, changing direction unexpectedly, or loitering for no obvious reason. Bychkov had been the soul of gentlemanly courtesy when he took her home; he had made no effort to force his presence on her when Irina asked to be dropped a short distance from her flat, and he hadn't asked her any intrusive questions. He had kissed her hand in farewell, told her to hold tight to her bag and advised her _'you need to be careful'_ as she headed into the back streets. Ros's skin had crawled at the comment at the time, but she still wasn't sure if her paranoia wasn't making her over-react to a piece of friendly advice. It was the man's watchfulness that made her uneasy; his sharp blue eyes appeared to be assessing her every word and movement, and he seemed alert beyond the level of most ordinary Muscovites. Had this been a regular operation, she would have contacted the Grid and asked for a check to be run on him. In London she had often been scornful of some field officers' tendency to do that at the drop of a hat rather than trust their own judgement. Ironically, only now that the possibility was denied her, did Ros really appreciate the reassurance it afforded.

Well, if nothing else, he had served one purpose. Dima had been markedly less aggressive towards her in the last few days, and Irina had seized the opportunity to ask for two days off. Ros knew that she would pay for her temerity in increased abuse later, but for now she would accept the gift with gratitude.

A dribble of melting ice-cream blobbed onto her hand. Ros shook it off, finished the remains of the cone, and started walking again, turning right towards the bank of the Moskva. After a few yards she stopped to pull a wet leaf from the sole of her shoe. No-one passed her, and no-one behind her stopped. She straightened and carried on. Through the haze the buildings of the Russian Defence Ministry glowered across the river at her, and Ros shivered involuntarily.

A queue of families had formed by the steps of the _Buran _to visit The Cosmic Experience_, _and excited, shrieking children were running around getting under everyone's feet. Proud parents were posing for a man who looked like the 'official' park photographer, and grandparents, many of them awkward in their best clothes, were looking on indulgently. Everything appeared supremely normal. Irina gazed up for a moment at the top of the old Ferris wheel that could have come straight out of the Third Man, and was almost knocked off her feet by a football that cannoned straight into her stomach. Winded, she dropped her bag and doubled over for a second to catch her breath as a group of small boys raced past, shoving and jostling for the ball.

"_Vova! _ I told you, not here!"The shout almost deafened her. Ros jerked upright. A man holding a squirming young boy by his shirt-collar handed her back her bag. "Excuse me. Now say you're sorry!" Sulkily, the boy did so. "Come on, Mama wants to have a photo taken." He gestured at the nearby photographer. "Look at those cameras! They have everything – special filters, a rangefinder … "

They were moving away as he spoke, but Ros caught the word. _Dalnomyer. Rangefinder._ Without haste she straightened her clothes, checking her coat for marks and muttering irritably about undisciplined children. An elderly man wearing a frayed pinstripe suit festooned with war medals grumbled gloomy agreement. Ros walked steadily along the path, gazing at the tourist boats belching out burps of noxious black fumes as they churned down the Moskva. After a while she leaned on the stone wall as if she were watching the river and risked a glance back. It was impossible to pick out any one man in the crowd, and all she remembered from her quick glimpse was a slight, balding man wearing sunglasses. She didn't even know for certain if the drop had been made, but that one word was no coincidence - that she _did _know. Rangefinder had taken her first delivery.

Over the next six weeks, Ros serviced two more dead drops, one in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour opposite the Kremlin and one in the _Globus _bookshop on Petrovka Street. The latter was located half a block behind the Lubyanka and made her seriously uneasy, but she came away from it with nothing worse than an unwanted copy of Dostoyevsky's _Crime and Punishment_ in her bag. She didn't appreciate her source's sense of humour, although it could have been worse; Solzhenitsyn's '_Gulag Archipelago'_ had been on the next shelf. That drop had carried a scrawled note saying it should be dispatched to London without delay, so Ros took the risk of using the encrypted phone to find out _how._

"Rangefinder?" The precise, well-bred voice of Connie James had swept her with a wave of nostalgia that almost brought tears. "Is there a problem?"

Ros had swallowed them back and made her report crisply and succinctly, mindful of the risks in being long-winded.

"Pyotr will be alerted. He'll contact you. Be careful." That was all. Even the final admonition was brisk and impersonal, and it had left Ros with a feeling of depression and anti-climax. She had tried hard not let herself expect anything, but she hadn't been able to curtail the faint hope of hearing even a vague hint of possible re-admission to the fold for Ros Myers after this operation.

_And why should they want you back? _Lying alone and sleepless, staring at the pewter disc of a full moon hanging over Moscow, she had tried to face the prospect that even if MI-5 _did_ get what they needed from her, her past betrayals might still exclude any likelihood of returning to Thames House. Harry _might – _perhaps_ -_ intercede for her. Then again, he might be willing to do no such thing.

There was little she could do about it but carry on, so Ros did exactly that. When she received a message from Pyotr she handed over the harvest of intelligence for transmission to London, and memorised the instructions for her next drop. In the meantime, Irina continued to work. What Ros sardonically thought of as the _'Bychkov effect_' had almost entirely worn off, and Irina was back to her previous status as Dima Latyushkin's favourite whipping boy. She took the humiliation, his verbal abuse, and the occasional shove and slap in a frightened silence, scrubbing and serving, washing and waiting until her bones ached, her eyes stung with tiredness, and Ros's guts burned with the desire to give him a personal introduction to some of the juicier parts of the unarmed combat training she had received at MI-6. Only self-preservation and her shadow existence as Rosalind Myers, the once and (possibly) future British Intelligence officer, stayed her hand, but the strain of isolation and needing to exercise constant self-restraint in _both_ her lives was beginning to tell. She had always been a lone wolf, yet she now found herself longing for the company she had spurned for most of her life.

Russians described April and May as _Liar's Spring, _and when she emerged from the club at the end of her shift, Ros remembered why. For a week the weather had been balmy and warm, and primroses pushed tentatively through the sodden grass of Moscow's parks. Suddenly, in the course of her shift, the temperature had plummeted, the sky turned leaden grey, and sleet was drifting in the air. Irina had dressed for spring that morning, and now found herself shivering as she hurried home. The wind almost bowled her over as she reached Pushkin Square. Moscow's massively wide boulevards had been built with grandiose military parades in mind; the city's Soviet architects had given little thought to providing shelter to pedestrians.

"Irina Alexeyevna."

Ros span round. She was already cold, but the ice that seemed to seize her entrails now came from inside.

"M - Major Bychkov. I - I didn't – er – didn't see you – I'm sorry." She prayed that her chattering teeth would account for the way she was stammering in confusion.

There was a smile in his voice, but in the shadows Ros couldn't see his expression very clearly. "I didn't mean to startle you. They say I am good at discreet observation."

_Too bloody good, _Ros thought. His skill had combined with her own preoccupation to catch her unawares.

"I hope you are well," he added politely.

"Yes, yes, thank you." Irina quavered. "Cold." Ros pulled her coat more tightly and hoped he might take the hint.

"Then it is better not to stand around. There is a restaurant nearby I think you might enjoy."

"Oh! Oh, I – I couldn't - " Irina began, but faltered as two slight frown lines appeared between those watchful blue eyes.

"I promise not to investigate or interrogate you," he said. "Unless, of course, you are a foreign spy when you are not doing Mr Latyushkin's washing up."

Irina laughed nervously; Ros's fingers tightened into fists in her coat pockets.

"Please come." He held out his arm. "It is on Spiridonyevski Lane, not far. Mari Vanna's. See, you're trembling ... the cold, no doubt."

" I – I – thank you." Ros accepted the inevitable. _Every damn bloody thing he says is __just__ ambiguous enough … _She had prepared a back-story for Irina Selesnikova. It was feasible enough to be acceptable and vague enough that it was unlikely ever to be exposed except through major effort, but she had never expected it to be subjected to the scrutiny of a fellow-professional. It was really down to her to deflect any suspicions Bychkov might have by making Irina totally convincing.

The restaurant itself almost turned her stomach to water. It was chic and upmarket - precisely the kind of place where Irina most feared the risk of recognition as Ros Myers. She was thankful when Bychkov took a table in a corner where the lighting was helpfully low. On the plus side, the surroundings were enough to over-awe Irina, and would go some way to explaining any sign of nerves.

Not, Ros thought grimly as the dishes were brought, that she intended to show him any. The ice that had initially flooded her veins had now moved to her brain. Ros Myers was back in control and intended to remain so. She had upbraided Jo Portman often enough for letting her emotions get in the way of her job. This was no time for her to commit the same error. She needed to cleave to Ros's self-discipline while blocking out every other trace of her nature, _and_ her real life.

_What real life?_ She raised her glass of wine to the man across the table.

"Thank you, Alexander Kirillovich. This is so kind of you."

"It's my pleasure." He touched glasses with her. "_Za zdorovye. _How is Mr Latyushkin?"

Irina blushed. "He is … he is just Mr Latyushkin."

"Hmm." Bychkov waited as two plates of soup were placed in front of them. "Yes. A fine businessman. Enthusiastic! Commanding." His tone was mocking, and the twinkle in his eyes confirmed it. "Not, perhaps, terribly intelligent. How is the soup?"

"It's delicious," she said. He looked pleased.

"It puzzles me that you should work in such a menial job for such a person. You are clearly intelligent, and you could do better. It does not make sense."

_Here it comes. _Ros knew he wouldn't be so crass as to ask direct questions. This was a sophisticated, skilful, _trained_ intelligence officer.

_So am I. _But he mustn't know that. Hesitantly, she told him about her parents' marriage fracturing under the pressure of growing anti-Russian sentiment as Latvia seized its chance for independence, her father's dismissal from his engineering job because he didn't speak the language, and his death from a heart attack a few months later. Her mother had swiftly re-married to a fellow Latvian with whom it became clear that she had been having an affair with for some time, and Irina, heartbroken over the loss of her father and clearly superfluous to requirements, had left for Russia.

"I didn't realise." She shrugged. "My qualifications weren't recognised here, and – and it was … difficult. Economically. I couldn't get a job and I had – well, I had to keep myself. I took what I could get."

Bychkov nodded thoughtfully. "Yes. That happened to many people." His blue eyes considered her appraisingly. "It is a well-known scenario, that one."

Ros concentrated on the last few drops of soup. Again, the apparently innocuous remark that could be interpreted in several ways – especially if you had a guilty conscience. When she looked up, she thought there was a slight, amused smile playing around his lips. Instinctively, she went on the attack.

"You find it funny? Because it isn't – being treated like a – a serf, being used and abused, having no-one who cares what happens to you … it _isn't_!"

She had spoken with more emotion than Irina usually displayed; the words were hers, but the intensity of feeling belonged to Ros. She muttered an apology, but Bychkov raised his hands in a pacifying gesture.

"No, it is I who should apologise. I know your situation cannot be easy. And alas, in Russia these days it can be dangerous, too." He patted her hand across the table. "Let us change the subject."

_Damn him. _Irina obediently made light conversation while on a deeper level, Ros silently tried to analyse the man. He was intelligent, polite, even charming, and in other circumstances, she might have enjoyed herself. She had yearned for company; now she had it, and she was certainly enjoying being able to eat well for the first time in longer than she cared to remember. But nothing would lessen the unease caused by Bychkov's intense gaze - following the movement of her hands as she ate, registering every change in her expression, looking deeply into her eyes as if, Ros thought – and God knows she wasn't given to whimsy – he was trying to reach into her soul as well. And every time she wondered whether his interest in Irina wasn't perfectly innocent, he would slip in one of those _double-entendres_ and she would see him watching her and rightly or wrongly, sense him waiting for her reaction.

By the time they finished the main course, Ros knew how a mouse trapped by a malicious cat must feel. Anger and a dangerous feeling of damaged pride at being so helpless in the face of his manipulation, were beginning to undermine her professional caution _and_ her self-control. When Bychkov suggested dessert, Irina, on the pretext of tiredness, refused as gracefully as she could, so he called for the bill. Irina thanked him shyly but made no attempt to contribute. Ros knew no Russian woman would ever do that. She might as well admit her identity – name, rank and number - and be done with it.

The wind was still raking the streets outside, and Irina accepted his offer to drive her home. The alternative was a mile long trudge up Tverskaya Street into the teeth of it, or a bone-chilling wait at the tram stop, and Bychkov's car – as befitted an FSB major – was illegally parked on Pushkin Square under the benevolentgaze of two GAI traffic police. The trip was made in silence, but whenever Irina glanced up his eyes seemed to be watching her in the mirror rather than the road ahead of him. _The Russians call it 'muravyei po kozhe_'_,_ Ros thought. _Ants on your skin._ It exactly described the effect of that penetrating gaze. An almost imperceptible crawling of her skin, as if the tightly coiled fear inside her was trying to wriggle out into full daylight.

Again she asked him to let her out on the main road. Bychkov tutted disapprovingly.

"I don't think this is very safe. I should drive you. Why do you like to live so dangerously, Irina Alexeyevna? Or have you a special liking for hiding in the dark?"

_No. For not having you know where I live. _She knew she could reach the flat on foot through the maze of back alleys before he could track her in the car. "It's quicker, you'd have go round, that's all." Swiftly, before he could object, Irina hopped out of the car. "Thank you again, Alexander Kirillovich."

"Irina Alexeyevna!" his voice followed her on the wind that was buffeting her back. "Irina Alexeyevna, it's dangerous, wait!"

_The only dangerous thing around here is you. And I've just about bloody well had enough of you toying with me. _Ros ignored the sound and quickened her pace into the deeper darkness of the lanes behind the football stadium. She had reached its outer corner when she felt, rather than heard, a rush of air behind her. She just glimpsed a raised arm in the muddy glow from the nearest street lamp before it was obscured and a powerful blow sent her sprawling onto the pavement.


	5. Chapter 5

She groped her way up from the darkness to a cacophony of babbling voices. The ground pressed cold and damp against her face, but when she tried to raise herself a bolt of pain seared through her and she slumped back. Although her vision was still unfocused, she could make out trouser legs and boots. Her mind screamed at her to get up, but her body felt numb and leaden, and wouldn't respond to the command.

"_Tikho, dyevushka. Tikho." Take it easy, young woman._ Ros felt herself being eased into a sitting position, and clamped her teeth into her bottom lip as the pain hit again. "Can you hear me?"

"_Da … da."_ Nausea made her retch, and she spat to clear her throat. She caught the acrid smell of Russian tobacco as the owner of the voice squatted down next to her. Other shadows trapped them in a blurry ring of coats and muddy, shuffling feet, and Ros felt a swell of panic.

"Did you see who hit you?"

"No … no … I don't know." Any incautious movement of her left arm caused a red-hot lance of pain to shoot down it, and her head throbbed painfully, but her sight was clearing. Her reply caused a muttered ripple of response from the people around her; Ros heard someone being instructed to fetch the militia and a woman's voice insisting loudly that an ambulance would be more use.

"No! No … please, no, I – I don't need … I'm fine." Gritting her teeth against the pain, she wobbled to her feet, clutching at bodies for support. "Really, I – I'm fine."

"Citizen, you should report this," someone objected. There was a chorus of approval. _Disgraceful … would never have happened under the Soviets … drug addicts … you should go to the clinic._

"_No. _Please." Ros clutched at her aching arm. " I just want to go home. Please." For all the granite-faced sullenness of Russians, you didn't have to dig very deep to find the open-hearted warmth of the Slav. To Ros, it went a long way towards compensating for Russia's nightmarish bureaucracy, rampant corruption and repressive government. But at the moment, it was a damned nuisance - a living barrier between her and the protective anonymity of her flat. She tried to pass through the bodies pressing around her, but she was still unsteady on her feet. "Please, I'm all right."

"Irochka!" The shrill exclamation was followed by a commotion in the crowd, and a short, plump, elderly woman bustled forward like a clockwork _matrioshka_ doll. "What happened?"

Ros recognised _Baba_ Tamara. She lived in the flat underneath her own, and was the building's unofficial guardian and everybody's adopted granny – whether they wanted one or not. She was one of the few people who knew Irina's story because Ros had deemed it easier to tell her than to try and avoid her. Before Irina could explain what had happened, half a dozen people in the crowd tried to do it for her. _Baba _Tamara snorted a ripe peasant oath and waved an impatient hand.

"She's my neighbour. I'll take her home." Her gnarled hand closed around Ros's arm. "You lean on me, _lapochka._"

"The militia should know," one of the male bystanders insisted.

_Baba _Tamara laughed. "One less form for them to fill in, that's one more glass of vodka they've got time for. Come on, let us through." She eased Ros forward and the crowd started to melt away as they moved slowly down the street.

"Tamara Vladimirovna … there – there's no need," Irina protested, but the old woman took no notice. Ros still felt sick, and the feeling was exacerbated as she remembered Bychkov's shout of '_it's dangerous!' _ Was it a warning or a threat? Or was the attack just a street mugging, and nothing more than a horrible coincidence? _That word again._ Irina's bag, which she had been wearing diagonally across her body, was still there, and she fumbled in it, wincing at the pain the gesture caused. Her purse was still in the bottom. If her assailant had just been a mugger, it surely would have been gone. Ros shuddered. The shadows seemed deeper than before. Every time something rattled or rustled unseen in the wind, her nerves jangled like the Kremlin chimes. The fact that her 'protector' was an eighty-year old did nothing to soothe them.

When they reached the building safely _Baba _Tamara insisted on escorting Irina up to the door of her flat, and she watched beady-eyed as the younger woman shakily unlocked it.

"I'll bring you some tea, _lapochka."_

Ros shook her head. She was grateful to the old lady, but her head was whirling with a combination of speculation, apprehension and mild concussion. She desperately wanted to close the door behind her and reach the reassurance of her gun, however spurious that reassurance might be. So Irina managed to fend her neighbour off with a promise that she would shout if she felt ill, and with obvious reluctance _Baba _Tamara retreated downstairs.

Ros locked the door, let her eyes adjust to the darkness in the flat, then hurried to the window and looked out. The street was deserted. She yanked the curtains shut, flicked on a lamp and pulled her gun out from under the mattress, heedless of the pain from her shoulder. It probably didn't offer much more protection than _Baba _Tamara had, but it would be better than nothing.

_Yeah - if you can use the bloody thing properly. _Her hands were shaking visibly, and the palms were so damp with sweat that if she had to use the weapon now she'd be more likely to shoot her own foot. She took off her coat and kneaded her shoulder cautiously. It was badly bruised, but no worse. The second in which she had glimpsed the raised arm coming towards her had just given her time to jerk aside, and it had probably saved her life. Whatever she had been struck with had been aimed at her head.

_No, that was no random mugging._ Ros sat down on the bed and drew her knees up against her chest. She forced herself to take slow, deep breaths as she tried to reconstruct what she had seen between getting out of Bychkov's car and being attacked, but her eyes kept flicking between the window and the door, and she couldn't concentrate. A sudden gust of wind rattled the window glass and made her jump violently.

_Calm down! For God's sake, Myers, you're out of practice! _Ros glanced in disgust at her trembling hands and got up angrily. The Russians had one cure-all for everything. _When in Rome …_

She downed the thimbleful of vodka in one, and lay down fully dressed under the quilt with the gun at her hand. Whether it was to be flight or fight, she didn't intend to engage in either in her nightdress, and before she did anything else, she needed to _think – _calmly and rationally, the way she'd been trained. She had made and forwarded the contents of three drops to London, and her next was scheduled in four weeks time. She had no real reason to think that her cover as Irina Selesnikova had been blown. On the negative side of the scales, she had no idea if the intelligence was of any use. Her unknown contact could, unbeknownst to her or Thames House, have been caught, and they might all be being fed _dis_information. Irina appeared to have become an object of interest to a high-ranking FSB counter-intelligence officer – at his birthday party she had overheard snippets of his colleagues teasing him about his division – and now she had fallen victim to a serious assault.

_So._ Ros eased over onto her back and stared up at the flaking plaster on the ceiling. That was the situation. Now the question was what to _do_ about it. That was a matter of judgement, but she wasn't entirely sure that she trusted her own. After all, Irina was here because of two massive past errors of judgement on Rosalind Myers's part. She had placed her trust blindly in her father's word, and as a result, lost him, lost her family and only been saved _in extremis_ by Adam Carter from losing her career. And she had almost lost her _life_ as a result of collaborating with the Yalta conspirators – but for Adam, she would have done. Her eyes stung at the memories. _It's your decision. He can't save you this time._

The thump of footsteps and a burst of shouting outside made her jerk upright, gun in hand. She darted to the door and peered through the spyhole. Another bellow, and Irina recognised Ivan Ilyich, the drunk from the seventh floor, with an equally sozzled companion, blundering up the stairs. Heart pounding, she waited until they had staggered up to the next landing and retreated back into the flat.

_Perhaps that's the answer. Call London. See what they think. _She checked that the phone was still safely cocooned in its little nest behind the bathroom sink. _You're on your own. No back-up from us._ To push the responsibility for the decision onto someone else would be weak and cowardly. All her training – not to mention a rigid, disciplined upbringing – argued against it. Ros turned her back on the temptation before she could yield to it.

She sat down again on the edge of the bed and absently massaged her shoulder, staring unseeingly at the threadbare carpet. If she alerted Thames House to Major bloody Charm Offensive Bychkov lurking around, or told them of the attack, Harry would probably terminate the operation, which could deprive MI-5 of intelligence vital to preventing whatever the Russians might be planning. _And, my dear Irina Alexeyevna, it will also slam the door on any slender hope your alter ego might have of any future life other than yours._ She wasn't fool enough to believe that she and Adam Carter would ever sail off into the sunset in a soft-focus haze of romance, but the flimsy operational thread that joined her to Thames House now at least allowed him a tiny, but legitimate corner in her thoughts. She curled into it with him sometimes when she needed to slough Irina's personality off for a while.

She got up abruptly and peered out again through a crack in the sagging curtains. The street was still quiet and deserted. _All right._ She would make the next pick-up and then reconsider. Decision made. Die cast. Debate closed. Irina showered and folded her clothes over the back of a chair. Ros shoved the warped, battle-scarred chest of drawers up against the front door, slipped her gun under her pillow and went to bed.

As the spring moved into summer, Irina toiled through the days and nights at the _Zolotoye Koltso_, keeping a low profile and an eye out for Major Bychkov. Had she been in his position, Ros would have pulled back and sent in another officer to do the watching. The turnover in staff at the club was high, since anyone who had the _propiska_ – the permit granting legal residence in Moscow – and a marketable skill soon went elsewhere. Several new people arrived, and for a while, Irina kept a wary watch on Vadim, the new doorman, a hulking Ukrainian with a roving eye and a hair-trigger temper. She relaxed a little when it became obvious that he was so stupid that Major Bychkov wouldn't have trusted him to tie his own shoelaces. Ros couldn't identify any immediate threat, but a feeling of unease seemed to have taken up permanent residence on her shoulder. Several times she felt eyes on her in the street without being able to identify any watcher. Twice, her documents were checked on the Metro when Irina had never been stopped before. It was probably routine, but … _always the buts_, Ros thought bitterly, as Irina scuttled off like a cockroach into the darkness at the end of the platform. Always the _buts_ and the silent fear.

The situation came to a head the day she had to go and service the latest drop. Moscow was wilting under a stifling blanket of heat, and Ros had to force herself to descend into the suffocatingly hot Metro for the ride to Catherine the Great's unfinished palace at Tsaritsyno. Because of the weather there were many fewer passengers than usual, which made it easier for her to spot the young man. She had noticed him at first because he had an easy, upright stride that reminded her of Adam. He left the train three stops before her, so when she recognised him in the ticket queue at the palace, albeit dressed in a different T-shirt, her every nerve went to maximum alert. She knew that she had to pick up the drop from a litterbin near the beautifully restored building that had been the Tsarina's Opera House. But first, she thought with grim determination, she had to get rid of this tail.

On the guided tour of the palace, she dutifully admired the spectacular interiors, and afterwards managed to slip her way sinuously through the crowd as the group was struggling to squeeze through a narrow corridor leading into the grounds. She ran swiftly to the ladies' toilet block she had noted earlier. She probably didn't have more than a few minutes before the bloodhound realised that the fox had given him the slip. _Think, Ros! _She _had_ to make this drop. Pyotr would have been notified of its arrival.

"_Zhenshina, shto vam?" _She glanced round, startled, as a wiry woman wearing a bright yellow safety jacket and carrying a traditional sorghum broom asked her if she needed anything. Irina shook her head and moved to wash her hands.

"_Nichevo, spasibo._" She watched in the mirror as the woman put the broom into a cupboard and exchanged her safety jacket for a denim one. She took off her headscarf, revealing a bushy head of violently hennaed hair, picked up a handbag, and slammed the door shut.

The instant she had gone, Ros tried the lock. _Child's play. _She slung her handbag across her body, pulled the safety jacket over it and tied the headscarf on. As several other women entered, she snatched up the broom, and for good measure, grabbed a large plastic bag half-filled with rubbish.

"_Prostitye, proshu vas._" She muttered her excuse me's and went outside, careful to slow her usual swift movements to a weary shuffle and hunching her shoulders for good measure. She was grateful for the presence of several visiting groups of schoolchildren who, despite the scolding of their teachers, had dropped a liberal scattering of gum, sweet wrappers and unwanted brochures. Slowly, Ros emptied bins and swept, holding her lower back and wincing visibly whenever she stooped, gradually advancing towards the Opera House. She could see her target litterbin but – so far – hadn't seen her tail. _Almost there, Myers. Almost there …_

She was just leaning over the bin when she spotted him in the distance. _If you thought to make yourself a tourist by wearing a Manchester United T-shirt, Comrade, you've got another think coming._ Ros lifted the bin to empty it and saw the stained, creased envelope with the faintly pencilled Russian letters I.S. In an instant she had slipped it into her bag and was just moving on when the sound of howling sirens tore apart the soft rustling of the breeze through the lacy birch leaves. Heads turned at the sound of shouting voices, and a large group of tourists who had just emerged from the Opera House asked each other in anxious, high-pitched Spanish what the hell was going on. Beyond them, Ros glimpsed several militia officers running in their direction. The young man who had been tailing her was gesturing and shouting orders at them.

Ros knew she had no more than seconds. She shoved the scarf and jacket into the bag of rubbish, discarded it and slipped into the very middle of the tourists. They had a Russian guide who was trying to shepherd them on quickly, and there were so many of them that she might just pass unnoticed. The group, eager to steer clear of trouble, obediently followed the guide's swift trot towards the exit. Ros tucked herself in beside a tall man built like a rugby prop-forward.

She peered cautiously round him. Whistles were still blowing, but the United T-shirt, who had been running full-pelt towards the Opera House, had hesitated, accosted, she noticed, by another man, this one in uniform. The latter was now doing the shouting.

"Looks like trouble," Ros said in Spanish, mentally thanking God for her father's posting in Lima.

"Yeah." The Spaniard grimaced. "Someone's on a one-way ticket to the polar bears." He winked down at her, and Ros smiled back as flirtatiously as she could manage with her heart thudding as if it were trying to burst out of her rib cage. "Give me Andalusia any day, eh?"

_Give me anywhere that isn't here._ As the guide urged them in accented Spanish to hurry back to the bus, the breeze carried fragments of the shouting to her.

"_Durak_! Moron! How _dare_ you take such a decision … those were not your orders! I don't care _who _told you … consider yourself disciplined! Call these wooden tops off!"

"Dunne what he's saying," the man said dryly, "but he doesn't sound happy."

"He –" the words snagged in Ros's throat as the officer removed his hat and wiped sweat from his forehead. "N – no. He – er … he doesn't."

"Well, not our business." He grinned engagingly as they reached the group's coach. "Come on, let's grab a decent seat. The general can solve his own problems."

_He's a major._ Ros smiled back. "Save me one next to you. I just want to take one last picture." She moved round to the front of the coach, keeping it between her and Major Alexander Bychkov, and, with infinite caution, looked back towards the Opera House. Militia officers were cordoning it off, and Bychkov was striding across the path towards them. The Spanish tourists were jostling to board the coach. For the moment the path to the exit was clear.

Ros was drenched in perspiration, her clothes clinging damply to her body. She would have been willing to bet that she would be the only person in a five-mile radius whose sweat was cold. She drew in a deep breath and slowly released it. Then, casually and without haste, Irina Selesnikova walked across the car park, turned right into the street and crossed it. Another militia car shot past her with its blue light flashing. Irina glanced back at it with mild curiosity and turned into a narrower side street. Ros waited for a further second until it was out of sight, and then started to run.


	6. Chapter 6

"Where are you going?" The driver rolled down his window as yet another flash of lightning cracked across the sky. The sudden thunderstorm that had exploded from Moscow's skies a short time ago was rapidly turning the many potholes in the road into minor lakes. Water was gushing down the gutters and beating down on the woman who bent towards the car.

"Tverskaya." Her clothes were sodden, water was streaming from her hair, and she was clutching a bag tightly in her arms in a futile attempt to protect it from the rain. "_Spasibo_."

He grunted and shoved the Lada into gear. He'd need to mop the car out afterwards, the state she was in. A police car overtook them with an impatient honk, lurched through a pothole and sprayed the side of the Lada with a mini tidal wave. "Oh, typical – _k chortu s nimi! _Bloody flatfeet!"

Ros turned her head sharply away as the police vehicle passed, and tuned out the rest of the man's muttered curses. It was standard practice in Moscow to wave a private car down and pay the driver a few roubles if you didn't want to use public transport, but in this weather she was lucky to have found a lift at all. Now all that mattered was to escape the trap she knew was an inch from snapping its jaws closed around her. Cars were usually slower than the metro, but inside one she ran far less risk of a police check once they were out of this area.

The little car bumped and rattled across town to the accompaniment of the driver's envious and irascible comments about the BMWs and Mercedes that hemmed him in and cut him up for most of the way. His windscreen wipers spasmodically screeched their way about halfway across the cracked glass, fighting a losing battle against the cascades of water streaming down it from the roof. Visibility couldn't have extended more than two feet ahead of them.

_Which suits me fine._ Ros's mind assessed her position at top-speed as Irina shrank into her clammy, saturated clothes and tried to stop shivering. _In the field there is no such thing as coincidence. _Even without Bychkov's appearance at Tsaritsyno the irrefutable confirmation of her recent suspicions that she was under surveillance was enough to set her professional alarm bells ringing. Factor in _his_ arrival too, and the ringing became a full-blooded carillon.

By the time Irina squelched her way from the car on Tverskaya and fumbled out a few soggy rouble notes to pay the driver, the deluge was easing slightly. Impelled by fear as much as by the weather, she ran the last few hundred yards to her flat, slithering in mud and splashing through icy puddles that welled up over her feet.

_You need to get out of here._ Her fingers were cold and clumsy, and it took her a frustrating minute to get the lock undone. Ros could have kicked it open more quickly, but the last thing she needed now was to attract attention. Once in, she pushed the bolt home.

_First things first._ With difficulty she peeled off her skirt and T-shirt, both of which were moulded to her body, and removed her sodden shoes. Her legs and feet were freezing. Swiftly, she dried herself and put on a spare top and her jeans. She rummaged under the mattress, found her gun and shoved it into her waistband, then hurried into the bathroom and extracted the mobile phone from its hiding place. The stash of money that she kept for emergencies – half in roubles, half in pounds – was hidden in a cavity Ros had created under the bath. She pulled it out. _If there was ever a sodding emergency, Myers, this is it. _She had no idea what had brought Alexander Bychkov to Tsaritsyno, what, or, more likely, _who_, but she wasn't about to stay around and find out. As far as she was aware, he didn't know her exact address, and since she was illegal he couldn't just phone the _spravochnoiye buro, _the Soviet-era information booths that had once tracked down any resident of Moscow for the price of a metro ticket. But a major in counter-intelligence had far more, and more efficient resources at his command. It wouldn't be long before he found Irina Selesnikova. And it wouldn't be much longer before he discovered that she was the child of a relationship between Ros Myers's imagination and the dextrous hands of a Polish forger. _Time to run._

Her bag lay in a wet heap with her discarded clothes. Ros took out the envelope that had very nearly cost her her freedom, and ripped it open. Inside lay a flash drive sealed in bubble paper, another envelope, and a small scrap of paper. The latter read 'Yaroslavl Station. September 15th, 12.20 pm. _Otpusk._'

Ros swore, copiously and with a breadth of Russian vocabulary that would have shocked her father. _Holiday_! It was the beginning of August. Where the hell was she meant to lie low for that long? And what would London say?

There was another ominous roll of thunder outside. Ros shivered._ Ask them._

She turned on the phone and rang the number. She had expected interference from the storm, but Connie's brisk voice was as clear as if she were standing at her elbow. "What is it, Rangefinder?"

Quickly, Ros explained about the forthcoming pause in deliveries, adding that she could be under surveillance and needed to go to ground for a while. There was a pause.

"Anything else, Rangefinder?"

_An attempt on my life, a near-arrest and a suspicious FSB counter-intelligence officer. And, I think, a leak at your end somewhere. _"No," she said. "Nothing more. But I need instructions."

She tapped her fingers impatiently on the edge of the table as another pause lengthened.

"Rangefinder, we need you to stay in place. Are you safe?" This time the voice was Harry's, and the sound of it brought a lump to Ros's throat that for a second made it impossible to speak. When she did, even she heard the tremor.

"Yes. But I need to change location immediately. And I have the drop for Pyotr."

"Do you have a secure hiding place at your current location?"

"Yes." Ros told him about the one under the bath.

"Leave it there. He'll be notified. Contact us again when you've relocated. Clear?"

"Clear." She longed to ask the questions that were churning in her mind – _has the information been any use, does Adam know who Rangefinder is, what happens when you don't need me any longer? – _but she kept her response to the one crisp word.

"Rangefinder, the information is solid, but we don't have enough. Not yet. We need to keep the source on side. So you _stay_ safe. No heroics. Is that understood? If you think you're in immediate danger we'll pull you out."

_We'll pull you out._ It was the first suggestion that she wasn't expendable. Ros's eyes filled and she hurriedly clamped a hand over her mouth.

"Rangefinder, _is that understood?_" Harry rapped.

"Yes. Yes, understood." Ros prayed that her voice sounded normal. If Harry heard uncertainty or distress – especially from Section D's very own emotional zombie – then her part in this would be over. And danger or not, she wanted to stay. She wanted the chance to earn his forgiveness, regain his respect, and _deserve_ that accolade of being his '_outstanding officer_'.

"Then be careful. We await your call."

The line went dead. Ros looked out of the window, but the view was blurred, and she knew it wasn't just because of the raindrops still streaming down the window pane. She gritted her teeth, but the tears spilled over anyway, and for a few precious seconds, the Ice Maiden used the only advantage her isolation afforded her, and let them flow.

_Shevelis, Irina!_ _Get a move on! _She wiped her eyes, locked the door of the mental prison in which she usually kept Ros Myers, and got , she began to shove her few clothes into a cheap blue and red checked plastic holdall of the kind almost every ordinary Russian used for travelling. She had hidden the afternoon's delivery as per instructions, and was collecting a few basic toiletries from the bathroom when she heard the tapping at the front door. For a second, she froze, then eased the gun from her jeans and moved out into the hall. The tapping came again, but it _was_ a tapping, not the aggressive banging she would have expected from the police. She was considering ignoring it when a voice shrilled, "Ira! Irochka! I know you're home! Ira, _otkrivai!_"

_Baba Tamara. Shit._ Hurriedly, Ros flung the toiletries into her bag, slid the gun under her clothes and went to open the door.

"_Oi,_ Irochka!" The old lady beamed and held out a soup pot, forcing Irina to take it into her hands. She bustled into the flat. "I saw you come in, you must have beensoaked through. I know you young people never eat properly, so I thought I'd bring you some soup. _Davai, davai,_ come on, heat it up! I'm leaving for my sister's tomorrow, I'll never eat it all. You'll catch your death, you must have been so wet - " The flow came to a halt as she saw the half-packed bag. She turned to Ros. "_Shto takoiye_ – are you going away?" She peered up at the taller woman. "_Milenkaya,_ have you been crying?"

Ros was about to deny it when the idea struck her like one of the day's bolts of lightning. Irina's eyes welled up again.

"But what's the matter?" _Baba_ Tamara seized both of her hands and patted them. "Come, tell me."

"No, no, I can't." Irina sniffed. "Tamara Vladimirovna, I can't. I have to leave. He – he might come after me." She started to cry. "I can't stay here, I'm scared."

The old lady clucked in concern. "This won't do, _lapochka._ Who is it you're frightened of?" She took the soup pot back. "Sit down," as Irina shook her head. "Tell me."

"The – the man I work for," Irina hiccupped. "He … he tried – he tried to m - make me sleep with him … he said he'd tell the – the militia I was an illegal if I – if I didn't – "

_Baba _Tamara's sharp little eyes narrowed. "_Svoloch,_" she hissed under her breath. Her broad peasant fingers squeezed Ros's hand. "_Dochka_, you should have kicked the little worm where it hurts."

"He hit me." Irina dabbed her eyes on a tea towel. "He told me – he said –he – he said he knows where I live and he'll send someone to – to teach me a lesson. _Baba _Tamara, I'm scared! If he sends the police they'll arrest me … I have to get away … I'm so frightened."

"Irochka, Irochka, you can't just run away! Where will you go?" Irina shook her head. "Do you _have_ anywhere to go?"

"Irina sniffed helplessly. "I don't know. I – I'll find somewhere. I can't stay here, he'll find me."

"Now you listen to me," her neighbour said firmly. "Stop that crying and listen to me. Tomorrow I'm going to spend the summer with my sister, Zoya. Out in the countryside, good clean air, fresh food. You come with me. You'll be safe in the village. No bullying little loudmouth is going to find you there."

_Done it._ The ripple of guilt that Ros had begun to feel at her manipulation of the old woman was replaced by a surging wave of relief. _Stay in character. _Irina wrung her hands anxiously.

"B – but Tamara Vladimirovna, my – wh – what about my job? I – I have to work … I have no money - "

"The farm," _Baba _Tamara said decisively. "They've never got enough labour. Most of the men are too drunk to know one end of a sickle from the other. That'll keep the wolf from the door, _dochka._ We'll get the train at eight. And don't you worry about Zoya. She won't mind. We'll look after you." She got to her feet. "You finish that packing now, have a good bowl of soup and get some sleep." She looked sharply at her as Irina's head went down. "You won't be frightened on your own, will you?"

"N - no." Irina's voice quivered. "Yes … I – I don't want to stay here now."

"Then bring that bag downstairs. You can sleep on the sofa." The old lady shook her head. "_Molodyozh. _You young girls … I'll go and get it ready." She trotted out.

Ros put the phone on to charge, threw the rest of her belongings haphazardly into the holdall, and then inspected the flat to be sure that she was leaving nothing that could identify Irina Selesnikova as Rosalind Myers. _With luck I'll never come back here again._ With luck, her next home would be in London.

_With luck. _She double-checked that the envelope was well concealed, unplugged the phone, swung her bag onto her shoulder and headed for _Baba_ Tamara's flat.

The following morning _Baba _Tamara woke Irina shortly after first light, bearing a glass of tea and a bowl of _tvorog_. Ros hated _tvorog_, but she had eaten little the previous day, so she pushed it down. She had slept fitfully, and, unknown to the old lady, with her gun underneath the sofa cushion that was serving as her pillow. If _Baba_ Tamara had heard her getting up in the night to check that everything was quiet in the street below, she made no comment, but she wasted no time in getting the two of them out of the flat and on the metro to Yaroslavski Station. It was only when the old lady shepherded her off the train that Ros, who had spent most of the journey trying to watch for surveillance without drawing attention to what she was doing, realised that she had no idea where they were going. As she laboured in _Baba_ Tamara's wake through the crowds, Irina timidly asked.

"Artyomovo," the old lady answered brightly as she barged her way to the head of a long, restless queue at the ticket office, waving the ID card of a World War II veteran that entitled her to do just that. When Irina tried to offer her money she shook her head fiercely in refusal, so Ros stood like a Rottweiler, guarding their motley pile of bags, buckets and a truly ancient military rucksack, scanning the blur of faces until she returned and led the way to the platform for the suburban train.

Despite her tension and the fact that she was effectively on the run again, Ros couldn't help smiling when they opened the train doors. She had long been used to the rush hour on the London Underground, but even at its peak most people at least _tried_ to give each other space, and there was a constant, muttered stream of apologies as ribs were jabbed and feet were trodden on. Moscow indulged in no such niceties – the train was literally taken by storm, the less physically able being heaved by the buttocks up the three high steps that put the train door a good foot above most of the passengers. Irina's attempt to shield _Baba _Tamara was shrugged off by the old lady herself, who charged in with elbows akimbo, head down like a maddened bull. By the time Irina was finally thrust into the carriage by the sheer press of shoving bodies, she was already triumphantly enthroned on a wooden bench, defending it with a phalanx of bags and buckets against the advancing ranks of passengers. Irina, bruised and breathless, flopped down next to her. The old lady grinned.

"_Molodyozh,_" she said again. "How do you think we beat the Fascists, Irochka?" As the train clanked, shuddered, and pulled out of the station, she smiled. "You're tired, _dochka._ Close your eyes."

Ros, exhausted by the events of the previous day, tension and a broken night, was sorely tempted to do just that, but just as her eyelids started to droop an authoritative male voice said: "Is this seat free?"

Irina swung round and met the unsmiling eyes of a man in uniform. Panic cramped her stomach.

_Baba _Tamara gestured to her to move closer to the window, then got up and sat next to her. "That one is." She linked her arm with the younger woman's and smiled encouragingly. "You have that nap, _dochka._"

Ros, who had now recognized the uniform as belonging to an official of the railway, forced herself to slacken her rigid muscles, and Irina managed a nervous smile. She closed her eyes obediently. _Bychkov can't track you here. You're safe. Relax. Relax. Relax …_

She didn't realise that the mantra had merged into the rhythm of the wheels on the track until _Baba_ Tamara nudged her awake. They got off at a halt that was little more than a strip of cracked concrete in the middle of open fields. The old lady waved energetically towards an elderly man waiting in the bright sunshine by a small, battered truck. He looked curiously and with a trace of suspicion at Ros.

"This is one of my young neighbours. Needs a bit of a holiday. Ira, this is my brother-in-law, Vassily Mikhailovich. Vasya, this is Irina Alexeyevna." Irina awkwardly extended her hand and had it almost crushed in his grip.

"One of your little lost sheep, eh, Toma?" The wrinkled, sun-burned face cracked into a smile. "You ever get your hands dirty on the job, Irina Alexeyevna?"

_Oh yes. Dirtier than you'll ever know. _Irina managed a shy smile.

"Not very often. But I'll work hard if you'll let me join in."

He lifted the bag from her shoulder and threw it over his own.

"Oh, everyone joins in here." He winked at her. "Welcome to Artyomovo."


	7. Chapter 7

Artyomovo turned out to be a tiny hamlet of about sixty houses strung out along the banks of a tributary of the Moskva. Wooden telegraph poles tilted at any angle to the ground other than a right angle provided an intermittent electricity supply through wires that sagged from years of bearing the weight of the winter snow. A small wooden _izba _imaginatively named '_Shop_' sold the basic necessities that the inhabitants couldn't grow for themselves in the small garden-cum-vegetable plot that surrounded every house. The village street was a simple track, trodden bare by booted feet and rutted by cars and trucks. Every vehicle that lurched through did so in a cloud of choking dust visible yards away. To arrive in or leave Artyomovo discreetly was impossible.

In fact, as Ros soon discovered, doing _anything _discreetly in Artyomovo was impossible. Entertainment was in short supply, and the villagers' main occupation when they weren't in the fields was observing each other. Irina's arrival was a major event, and any attempt on her part to keep herself to herself would merely have served to fuel gossip and speculation. _Baba _Tamara told people more or less what she had told Zoya and Vassili and intimated, without giving details, that Irina had 'man problems'. It was the right answer; the women nodded with a resigned sympathy, the men, Ros was mildly amused to note, wisely said nothing, and nobody asked any awkward questions. _Baba _Tamara's seal of approval, it seemed, carried enough weight to protect her from excessive curiosity, and for that, Ros was grateful. She was thankful to be out of the city; in her early days there the massive solidity of its buildings, with their stern granite facades, had seemed like a fortress, offering the protection and shelter she so desperately needed. More recently, it had begun to feel like a trap, and those same buildings like sheer, claustrophobic walls sealing her into it. The relief of having escaped it – albeit temporarily – left her drained, and for the first few days Irina allowed herself to accept the old lady's command to rest, even as Ros mentally excoriated herself for being such a wimp.

The fresh, unpolluted air, together with several consecutive nights of deep sleep, solved Irina's fatigue problem, but her new surroundings soon presented Ros with another one. Irina had firmly refused Zoya's offer for her to use the spare bed because it was obvious that it was normally used by _Baba _Tamara. Instead, she slept on a small fold-out bed with springs that sagged almost to the ground when she lay down and clung to her spine whenever she turned over. The discomfort didn't bother Ros, who had explored some fairly remote places when her father had been posted abroad, but the bed was crammed into the room at the foot of _Baba _Tamara's, and the lack of privacy did. Most Russians never seemed to feel a need for privacy, and their language – rich and imaginative as it was – actually didn't include a word for it. In addition, years of privation meant that lending, borrowing and sharing what little you had was as natural as breathing. Ros couldn't run the risk of anyone stumbling over her high-tech encrypted phone, or, even worse, her gun. She could keep the phone on her, but while part of her professional training urged her to keep the gun close too, in case of emergency, the other part knew that doing so could blow her cover. So on her second evening in Artyomovo, Ros scraped out a small hole in the dusty earth behind the long-drop toilet and buried it among the nettles there.

The farm lay on the outskirts of the village half a mile to the north, and within a week, _Baba_ Tamara had introduced her to the manager of it. Once it had been a large collective farm but like so many others, had collapsed along with the political system that had given birth to it. The manager was about Irina's age, and clearly enthusiastic, even in the face of what Ros thought was a losing battle. When _Baba_ Tamara explained that Irina needed work, his face lit up, and Irina felt duty-bound to warn him of her limited knowledge of all things agricultural.

"Oh, _that_ doesn't matter!" He beamed at her. "We need all the hands we can get, Irina Alexeyevna." He frowned slightly. "I can't afford to pay you very much though … it may not be enough - "

Hurriedly, Irina reassured him that she would be happy to work anyway, and he extended his hand. "Kalinin, Sergei Ivanovich. Let me show you how things work."

_Or how they don't, _Ros thought wryly as the weeks went past. Many of Sergei Ivanovich's workers were the elderly former members of the _kolhoz_, and they resented his attempts to prise them away from the traditional way of doing things. There was a low-level but constant friction between them and the few younger men and women who had set up the co-operative with him. Hardly any of the ancient Soviet equipment still worked properly, and almost every job on the farm was done by hand. Nobody seemed to have a specific task, so Irina went from shovelling muck in the pigsty to spreading it on the fields, learnt how to use a sickle without amputating a toe, and developed an undreamed-of ability to dodge the occasional flying hoof of an irascible milk cow. Moscow felt a lot further away than sixty kilometres, and when Ros sat in the middle of a beet-field sharing a lunch of potato _pirozhki_ and _kvass_ with her fellow-labourers, Thames House seemed as insubstantial as the heat mirages quivering on the horizon. The date and day of the week lost much of their significance, and she had to make a real effort to remember to check her phone for messages, of which there had been none since she had made a brief call to report her new location. Logically, Ros knew that 'no news is good news', but the cliché, far from consoling her, perversely increased her loneliness. Although the other farm-workers were friendly, and _Baba_ Tamara and her sister treated Irina with the kind of maternal affection that Ros had almost forgotten existed, she still had to spend every day lying, inventing and pretending. Occasionally someone would behave in a way reminiscent of someone from her past; sometimes a memory would creep to the forefront of her mind as she sat eating with the old people and she had to quash the longing to share it. _Ironic. _Ros Myers had been – _was_ – almost obsessively private, emotionally repressed to the point of excess, and here she was yearning to reveal something of her real self to people who, for her safety and probably theirs, must never know anything of it. Only with London could she be herself – and London didn't call.

It was at the beginning of September when the stress caused by the dichotomy of her existence finally came to a head. Irina's last job of the day had been to feed the farm's flock of geese, a thankless task that had already provided her with several bitten fingers and nips on her ankles. She finally battled her way out of the pen, pursued by pecking beaks and frantic gobbling. The sound of her name made her jump. Sergei, a wide smile on his face, held up two bottles of Baltika, the ubiquitous Russian beer. "You deserve a prize for escaping intact. Join me?"

Irina hesitated. She liked the farm manager; he was a cheerful, humorous man who rarely allowed the complications of his job to get him down. He had been kind and welcoming to her, and both women, Irina _and_ Ros, had responded to his warmth. And as fond as she had become of _Baba _Tamara and her sister, slightly more sophisticated company, and conversation that went beyond the garden fence were welcome. So she smiled agreement and let him lead her into a nearby field where they had been working earlier in the week.

"We should test the solidity of our handiwork." He grinned, and waved a hand at the untidy stacks of hay dotted about the field like the shaggy heads of so many hippies. His eyes sparkled teasingly. "Which one was it you put the final touches to?"

"That one." Irina pointed. She had scrambled up the most rickety, wobbling ladder she had ever set foot on to fix a plastic sheet on the top to protect it from rain.

"Right." They sat down at the foot of it, and Sergei handed her a bottle. "If it collapses, I'm sacking you. _Za zdorovye._" He gestured at the sky. "No better way to end a day's work than with a beautiful sunset."

Irina followed his gaze to the iridescent blue sky and the pink and lilac streaks swirling across it like swathes of tangled silk. She spoke without thinking.

"Yes, it's wonderful. I used to watch them at home too."

"Where's home?" he asked.

_A flat in Barnes, overlooking the Thames. Adam and I used to curl up under a quilt on the balcony sometimes and have a glass of wine together while we watched the sun go down._

"Riga. Before I came to Russia, I mean. My mother's Latvian."

"That explains it." He smiled. "Your accent, I mean. Sometimes you can hear it." Ros wondered if he had seen something in her face, because he added quickly, "It's only very slight. And it suits you. Do you miss it? Home."

"Sometimes. I miss the sea…swimming in summer." _Adam took me once – just once – to Dorset one summer weekend when we weren't on duty. We messed around like kids – paddled in the sea, raced each other along the beach, and he sulked because I beat him. Afterwards we made love in the sand dunes and nearly got discovered in flagrante by a party of bloody schoolchildren. We only just made it to the car. God knows what Harry's reaction would have been if his two senior officers had been arrested for obscene behaviour in a public place. We laughed about it for days._

"You can swim in the river here, you know. I know it's not the Baltic, but it's safe as long as you're careful with the current."

"Oh, I – no. I – I don't think I … I don't really like rivers – the weeds and the mud …" she trailed off. The _last_ thing she needed was memories of the last time she had been in a river. Or of whom she had been in it with.

"Sorry?" She realised that she hadn't heard his words.

"I asked if you'd ever like to go back. To Latvia?"

Irina shrugged. " I - I don't know if there's a place for me there now. I'm not sure I can really call it home any more." As Ros heard the words she wondered with a lurch of sudden alarm which woman had actually answered that question.

"That's a strange way of putting it," Sergei said.

Hastily, Ros gave herself a mental kick in the seat of the pants. "It's … complicated. Personal things." She summoned up Irina's timid smile. "Tell me about yourself. What made you decide to help to rescue the farm in the first place?"

It was a simple trick, she thought, but whatever the nationality, it always worked. Flatter a man by asking them about themselves and the spotlight moved off you pretty damned quick. All the same, she listened attentively, making the right comments, and being careful not to ask questions to which she should have known the answers. She didn't need to feign interest; his energy and enthusiasm for his job – even when it was borderline impossible - intrigued her, and his witty, self-deprecating stories of some of the odder predicaments he had got himself into made her laugh.

"Don't you ever get discouraged? Trying to bring change to people who don't really want it?" she asked.

He shook his head and took a long swallow from his bottle. "Why would I bother? It's a waste of time. Drains energy. And it's not _creative_. Don't you agree? Hasn't our country suffered enough from thinking we can never make change happen successfully? We Russians can do anything we want to do – we just have to _believe _we can." He grinned. "After all, look at you, Ira. You were like a little _beriozka _trembling in the wind at the bottom of that ladder the other day, but you got to the top."

Irina pulled a face and tossed a handful of hay at him. He would never know that Ros Myers could shoot a man without a second thought but was terrified of heights. _And it's just as well. He's just an ordinary, decent man. _He had ideals of a kind she had shed long ago, he spoke with sincerity, and she couldn't sense any duplicity in him. Perhaps it was just her knowledge of her own that made her so suspicious of everyone else.

_Like Bychkov. _She hadn't thought of him for some time; he seemed so distant from and alien to her current surroundings that he had almost slid off her mental radar altogether. His abrupt re-emergence was like a dash of icy water in the face.

"Ira? What's wrong? You're miles away." Sergei gently plucked several errant threads of hay from her hair and looped a loose strand of it behind her ear. "You look worried, what is it?" His voice was kind.

"Nothing. Nothing - really. Just … just – something I remembered." _That I'm under cover. In hiding. And letting my guard down like a bloody amateur._

"You're worried," he repeated. He took her hand. "Ira, whatever it is that's wrong, you can talk to me about it."

He was dark, not blond, and the eyes that regarded her with anxious affection were a warm dark brown, not light blue, but the words spiralled Ros back to the day she had agreed to work for the Yalta conspiracy, and the voice she heard was Adam's. '_What is it, Ros? You can tell me.'_ And even though she had longed to let him hold her while she did just that, she had shaken her head, left him with the lie and walked away into her double life. _Exactly as I'm going to have to do now. _She had been strong then, sure of herself, and on home ground. Now she was none of those things, and the sudden intensity with which she _wanted_ to tell Sergei exactly what was wrong was proof of that. His concern was for Irina. It was Irina whose company he had sought and Irina to whom he was attracted. But it was Ros, maybe understandably but most _definitely_ unforgivably, who was letting herself respond.

"There's no need. I'm fine, honestly."

He looked dubious. "Is that true?" When she nodded firmly, he sighed, and looked at his watch. "_Ladno. _Well, if you're sure, I'd better be going."

"I thought everything was done?" Irina said as they got to their feet.

"Paperwork." He rolled his eyes. "Do you speak any English?"

The question jolted her. She shrugged. "A little. From school, you know."

"Our _volokotina – _they call it red tape. That's our Mother Russia." He switched to careful English. "Red Square, red flag, red tape." He gave a mock salute. "_Spokoinoi nochi, _Ira."

"_Spokoinoi nochi. _Thank you for the drink!" Irina watched him go with a feeling she was trying hard not to recognise as regret. The following day was Sunday – _and a good job too. _She would have time to give Ros bloody Myers a badly-needed refresher course in professional - and emotional - discipline. _Risking your security for the sake of company and conversation._ _Idiot._ Adam would have pulled her straight off an undercover operation for behaving that way.

She could hear the television blaring from the cottage even before she unlatched the warped wooden gate. Vassili Mikhailovich was a little hard of hearing. The reception on their ancient Soviet-made television wasn't of the best, but Irina recognised the introductory music of the weather forecast. The evening news bulletin would be on soon. Watching Russian news programmes was rather like harvesting Russian fields – you had to get through a lot of chaff to find the wheat – but Ros still welcomed any chance to glimpse the world beyond Artyomovo. She stopped to scrub her hands and face at the rudimentary washbasin. _You could do with scrubbing the rest of you as well._ She sighed. She was sweaty, dirty, and a faint odour of manure clung to her clothes. Once a week Vassili Mikhailovich would prepare the _banya, _the wood-fired steam bath at the bottom of the garden, but in between everyone made do with buckets of sun-warmed water. Ros patted carefully at her face with a towel with that rasped against her skin like sandpaper. She was surprised that _Baba _Tamara hadn't bustled out to fuss over her as she usually did. When she entered the house she found all three elderly people clustered around the TV. None of them spared her more than a cursory glance. Ros frowned.

"Tamara Vladimirovna? What's happened?"

The old lady turned, startled. "_Oi, _Ira! _Idi syuda._ Come here, come and see – it's a terrorist attack. An explosion, look! _Kakoi koshmar."_

Irina slid onto the wooden stool next to her and peered through the screen's permanent snowstorm at the images of what looked like a park filled with the scattered debris that was the aftermath of a bomb.

"In Moscow? Where – " The words died on her lips as the picture changed to a grainy aerial shot of a neoclassical-style building overlooking a broad, muddy-looking river. The caption at the bottom of the screen read 'Штаб-квартира британских служб безопасности'. _The headquarters of the British Security Services. _Ros's hands clenched of their own volition. She had spent the last hour trying to manage the contradictions of her two personae, but there was no split in her personality now; it was Rosalind Myers, Senior Case Officer, Section D,who burned with anger as she stared at the screen. Fragments of the Russian voice-over reached her ears – '_several fatalities … totally unfounded accusations … ambassador summoned to the Kremlin … British intelligence failure …' _but she only heard _Baba _Tamara's words when the old lady repeated them.

"_Shto?"_

"The bomb." _Baba_ Tamara was looking at her with concern. "Ira, _dochka,_ don't be afraid. That's where it was. Not here. _V Londonye." _ In London.

_**Thank you for reading! Please review.**_


	8. Chapter 8

Ros spent a sleepless night listening to _Baba _Tamara's snores and trying not to move for fear of waking her with a symphony of squeaking bedsprings. She wished she had been able to impose the same stillness on her mind; it had been whirling like the sails of a windmill in a gale ever since she had seen Thames House on the news bulletin. Irina had murmured the expected words of shock as the details of the bomb attack were broadcast – _three dead, a dozen injured_, _no warning given_ – and listened in silence as Vassili Mikhailovich scornfully dismissed the rumours mentioned by the journalist in London that the authorities there suspected Russian involvement. Maintaining that silence as the old man expressed his less than complimentary opinion of the British had tested Ros's self-control to the limits. Eventually Irina had volunteered to go and feed the half-dozen chickens Zoya Vladimirovna kept at the bottom of the garden. She had vented a little of her pent-up anger by throwing the feed _at_ the unfortunate birds rather than to them, but even then she went to bed so tense that it was close to dawn before she drifted off.

When she heard _Baba _Tamara and the others stirring, she kept her eyes shut and her head buried in the pillow. In Soviet times the village church had been used to keep pigs in, but now the community was re-building it, and she knew they would go to the service. Sometimes Irina accompanied them, but Ros knew that if they thought she was still asleep she could snatch a couple of hours alone. And she needed those hours, because the one conclusion she had come to in the course of the night was that she _had _to contact London. It wasn't just that she desperately wanted to know if anyone from Section D had been hurt – or at least that was what she told herself as she ate a slice of black bread liberally smeared with honey, and washed it down with a glass of tea. If the Russians really _were_ involved in the bombing, Harry might need to pump his source, which he wouldn't be able to do while she was sitting out here in the bloody steppes playing Little Bo Peep.

She left a note reading '_gone for a walk'_ on the table, shoved her phone deep into her back jeans pocket and set off briskly out of the village. There were few people around, but three small boys, the visiting grandsons of an elderly neighbour, scampered up to her, all jabbering at once. Ros had always been hopeless with children; she rarely had contact with any, and whenever she did, their bluntness and curiosity left her tongue-tied and on the defensive. But these three – strawberry-blond, gap-toothed and freckled – had taken a liking to Irina, probably because in a decaying village populated largely by pensioners, she was the closest person to them in age. So she checked her burning impatience to make her phone call, listened to their excited tale of finding a toad under the cabbages the previous day, and then gave them a handful of coins to go and buy sweets with in order to escape.

She worked her way down to the river bank to avoid having to pass too close to the church, and walked until she was well clear of the last few houses. It was already becoming hot in the sun, but it was pleasant in the dappled shade of the ubiquitous birch trees and the occasional willow. Had Ros not been in such a state of mental turmoil she would have relished the opportunity to sit, listen to the burbling of the water and breathe in the scent of the warm, loamy earth. Instead she chose a spot where she had an unimpeded view of the fields stretching into the distance across the river, took a full minute to listen for the sound of voices or footsteps, and only then took out her phone and called.

"Rangefinder?" _Connie again._ Ros knew that after a bomb attack, Harry would have sent out a red-flash summons to all his staff, Sunday or not. She felt an almost unbearable surge of frustration at no longer being on his list of recipients.

"I heard about the bomb," she said.

"Yes." Connie's response was crisp and business-like. "Do you have any intel?"

"No. No, I'm still - "

"Then contact us when you do, Rangefinder. And in the meantime, follow your instructions and communicate only in emergencies." Her tone reminded Ros of one of her old boarding-school headmistresses.

"Wait! Is – is everyone all right? Was anyone hurt?"

Connie's voice sounded more exasperated than ever. "Rangefinder, stick to protocol! This -"

Ros's temper snapped. "Just _tell_ me! I don't need a lecture - " She winced at the sudden burst of crackling.

"Yes, you do." The voice now was Harry's, and it slashed like steel. "Unless you have specific intelligence to provide, Rangefinder, you do _not_ use this phone unless you are responding to a message from me. Now, listen. I need you back in Moscow urgently. I need you to make your next scheduled drop, and _when - _" he raised his voice as he obviously sensed Ros readying herself to interrupt, "when you do, I need you to persuade the source to agree to a face-to-face meeting at which you will get him to stop going three times round the mulberry bush and supply the information he's been promising. I don't care how you do it. You will not - I repeat, _not,_ Rangefinder_ -_ run the risk of revealing your real identity before you get to him. But once you have, you _will_ secure that meeting and obtain the information. It is of crucial importance that you do. Is your previous location secure?"

Ros swallowed. "I'm not sure. I don't think so."

"Memorise this number." He reeled off a Russian mobile phone number, and Ros closed her eyes as she committed it to memory. "Ring it from another phone when you are leaving for Moscow. Pyotr will find a safe location, meet you and take you to it. Do you understand?"

"Yes." Ros didn't dare say – or ask - anything else; she knew that tone.

"Good." For a split second his voice softened. "No-one has been hurt." Ros closed her eyes in relief as he rapped: "Now get off this line and obey your orders!"

She stood for a moment with the phone in her hand, staring unseeingly across the river. _Slava Bogu. Thank God._

"Nice phone."

The words came from behind her. Ros felt her skin erupt in goose pimples. She gave herself a second to compose her face, clenching her hands around the treacherous _sodding_ instrument to stop them trembling, before she let Irina turn round. _Did he hear me speaking English?_

"Sergei Ivanovich! Where did you come from?"

"I'm just walking. Like you." He smiled, and repeated, "Nice phone. May I see?"

_Don't raise suspicion._ She handed it over, and he examined it. "You prefer Nokia?"

"Oh, _I_ didn't buy it." Irina smiled – winningly, Ros hoped. "My _dyadya _Vanya sent it to me. He likes to stay in touch. He's so far away … I miss him. " She winced as she realised how true that was. "I can't afford to use it much though – it's so expensive. Look." She leaned across him and smiled up into his face. "When I was little my father let me have a pet rabbit at our _dacha._" _Almost true._ Jocelyn Myers had allowed Ros to keep a guinea-pig in Lima. She had been distraught to learn from one of the servants that the Peruvians considered them a delicacy. Now she swept her fingers across the screen and a picture of Bugs Bunny appeared.

Sergei smiled back, but distractedly, losing interest in the phone as Irina slipped her arm through his and pressed close. "I'm glad you're here; it frightens me a bit when there's no-one else around." She thrust the phone back into her pocket.

"Silly thing." He kissed the top of her head and clasped her hand. "Shall we walk for a while?"

Ros's clothes felt sticky as the cold sweat dried on her body, but Irina nodded eagerly and chatted about recently re-reading The Master and Margarita – _thank God I did! _– as they strolled. Literature took them safely to where the river-path ended, and they reversed their steps to return through the village. The delicate, rapid tinkling of church bells was audible now, and people were trickling out of the half-finished building as they approached. Irina saw Tamara, Zoya and Vassili Mikhailovich waving, and waved back. _Baba _Tamara looked at her with a mischievous gleam in her eye.

"_Nu, shto zhe, _Irina Alexeyevna. Romantic strolls with a handsome young man?"

Irina flushed scarlet. "_Baba_ Tamara, _mnyeh dyeudobno. _Don't, you're embarrassing me. We were just walking._"_

The old lady made a harrumphing noise. "_Nu pryamo._" Her eyes twinkled. "Sergei Ivanovich, come and eat with us! Zoyushka and I are making _pelmenni._ Tastiest in the village!"

He shook his head. "I shouldn't put you out, Tamara Vassilievna." He smiled at Irina.

_Thank God, _Ros thought, as Irina smiled shyly back. _Baba _Tamara shot a crafty glance at her. 

"Vassili Mikhailovich is heating the _banya _afterwards. And he's bound to have a bottle of the good stuff hidden somewhere."

"The _banya_!" Sergei Ivanovich's face lit up and Irina's heart sank. "Oh, well then, I might just let myself be tempted, Tamara Vassilievna."

_Baba_ Tamara beamed with satisfaction, and Ros, who had been planning to use the afternoon to work out a way of explaining her imminent return to Moscow and the evening for breaking the news, gritted her teeth and tamped down an embryonic shriek of sheer vexation. _Patience is a virtue, Miss Myers. _It had been the mantra of one of her instructors at MI-6. Ros had wanted to deck the man every time he used it, but the old fossil was right. She had got away with the phone call by the skin of her teeth. Beneath Harry's anger with her, she had sensed deep alarm, and she suspected the situation was more critical than he was letting her know. He needed her, so she _would_ be careful. And patient. She smiled at the old people, moved a little closer to Sergei Ivanovich, and strolled with them back to the cottage.

She insisted on helping with the making of the _pelmenni,_ despite the urgings of _Baba _Tamara , who was in a match-making mood, that she sit down with Sergei. Irina managed to shape the little meatballs, join in the vodka toasts and keep up with the conversation while Ros simultaneously tried to work out a good, credible reason for making her escape from Artyomovo.

The meal was good, but Irina was relieved when Vassili Mikhailovich levered himself from the table and went off to prepare the _banya._ Sergei Ivanovich offered to help, and Irina, driven away from the sink by _Baba _Tamara flapping a tea-towel at her as if she were an errant bluebottle, perched on the steps of the little bath-house and watched them chopping wood, lighting the stove and filling buckets and bowls. She cringed when Sergei brought an armful of wood out from behind the _banya_ and rubbed ruefully at the nettle stings on his arms.

"_Bozhe,_ but it's like a jungle behind there," he exclaimed. "They could do with pulling the whole lot up. God knows what's under it all."

Irina smiled as he dumped the wood outside the _banya _door. "I wouldn't. You never know what you might find_." A 9mm Makarov, for a start._ "My father once found an unexploded grenade under our potatoes."

Sergei laughed, and, to her relief, sat down and put his arm round her. "I take it he survived the experience?" She said nothing. "Ira?"

"That one, yes," she said. "But he did die."

"I'm sorry." She felt him stroke her hair. "You must miss him."

Ros felt momentarily guilty for arousing his sympathy with lies, but then she remembered Jocelyn Myers, locked in a cell twelve feet by six, rejecting all her attempts to contact him.

"Yes. Yes, I do." _Stop this, Ros!_ She could _not_ afford to let herself become fond of this man. She had always been acutely aware of the danger of Ros 'contaminating' Irina. She had never imagined Irina becoming so real that she and her emotions would begin to bleed into Ros. She scrambled to her feet. "I – I'll go and help _Baba _Tamara." She was aware of him watching her in puzzlement as she fled back to the house, but she didn't look back. Irina stubbornly kept herself busy with the clearing up until he and Vassili Mikhailovich had bathed and she and _Baba_ Tamara – Zoya's heart problems meant that she avoided the _banya – _were sitting together, perspiring gently in the damp steam. Ros had experienced the _banya_ before, at the _dacha_ of a wealthy acquaintance of her father, so when _Baba_ Tamara slapped her back and said: "Ready?" she knew what was coming. Irina nodded, climbed up to the upper bench and lay flat on her stomach with her head pillowed in her arms.

_Baba_ Tamara might have been eighty years old, but she had lost nothing of the power in her arms, and she wielded the _vennik_, the bunch of dried birch leaves, with vigour as she thrashed Irina's prone body with it to cleanse her pores. The scent of birch whisked Ros straight back twenty years. Unbidden, and _certainly_ unwanted, tears leaked into her eyes as her skin began to sting.

"_Na spinu."_ She rolled over obediently and thankfully closed them in case of a misdirected whack from the _vennik. _"_Takaya khudenkaya._" _Baba _Tamara clucked disapprovingly. "Only birch trees should be so thin." When Irina had returned the compliment with the _vennik_ the two women gave each other a thorough wash, with Irina trying to be gentle, to _Baba _Tamara's disgust, and the old lady scrubbing Irina's skin as if she were scouring a greasy frying pan.

Zoya Vladimirovna had brought lemon tea, black bread and a saucer of home-made blackcurrant jam into the _predbannik_, the little room that formed a half-way house between the heat of the _banya_ and the cool of the air outside. Irina put on the ancient bathrobe _Baba_ Tamara had given her, poured a glass of tea for both of them and was about to take the plunge when the old lady pre-empted her.

"Irochka, I know something's on your mind. Spit it out, _dochka._"

Ros, taken completely by surprise, almost spat out the tea instead. _Baba _Tamara looked amused.

"I'm eighty years old, _maya khoroshaya_. I've heard every secret there is."

_Except that you've been harbouring a disgraced British Intelligence officer who's spying on your government. _Ros decided that the most obvious explanation was probably the least risky.Irina took a gulp of tea.

"Tamara Vladimirovna, please don't be cross, but I – I have to go back to Moscow. You've all been so kind, but I must go back and find work … the farm doesn't pay very much and I have to get a real job. I'm sorry … I'm really sorry, but – you – you don't mind, do you? "

_Baba _Tamara patted her arm. "Sergei Ivanovich will be disappointed." As Irina turned crimson and looked down at the fraying rug, she laughed. "_Lapochka,_ don't be silly. Of course I don't mind." The wrinkles in her face deepened into a fierce frown. "You just promise me you won't go back to work for that other _negodyai_!"

"No, no," Irina said hastily. "Never. I'll look for something else." She hesitated. "I wish you'd let me pay you something – I mean, you've fed me and looked after me - "

_Baba _Tamara's calloused hand smacked down on her leg. "Don't you dare insult me. Who do you think I am – Oleg Deripaska?" Irina smiled at the mention of the multi-millionaire hotel owner; _Baba_ Tamara snorted. "You just take look after yourself, _milaya._ No more big-mouth, big-belly _blin_ like that until I come back and see him off for you. _Dogovorilis? _Deal?"

"Deal." Irina hugged her, partly so that Ros could bite her lip unseen and gulp back the threat of tears. She knew she wouldn't see the old lady again; for all she knew, Alexander Bychkov could have tracked Irina Selesnikova's refuge down by now. _Damn this country, damn these people. _Rosalind Myers did _not_ get emotionally involved on duty. _I am not Jo bloody Portman_. But the last nine months in Russia had brought to the surface emotions that she had long believed to be buried deep, safely beyond reach.

_Like your gun._ She would have to retrieve that before the following morning. She released _Baba _Tamara and made herself smile. "He'd run a mile if he saw you coming, Tamara Vassilievna."

"Humph," the old lady said, but she looked pleased. "I'd soon tell _him_ where to put his capitalist assets. _Nu,_ if you're going back to the big city, then we'll toast you on your way first. It's about time Vasya's plum brandy saw the light of day." As Ros went to rise with her she waved her down. "You finish your tea and get dressed." She bustled out and Ros did as she was told. As she pulled on her jeans her phone, which she had forgotten about, fell from the pocket to the floor. Ros picked it up and wiped it on a towel. Her link - her _only_ link – to her other life, to Harry, to Adam. To the _real _Rosalind Myers. _I need you in Moscow urgently …. it is of crucial importance that you do._ Harry hadn't said it in as many words, but she knew that it was also going to involve considerable danger. So did he.

She shoved the phone into her pocket, made a cursory attempt at tidying her damp, birch-scented hair, and took her first steps towards going to meet it.


	9. Chapter 9

Ros left Artyomovo early the following morning. She had slipped silently out of the cottage during the night, retrieved her gun in the glow provided by her mobile phone screen, and then buried it deep in her bag to the accompaniment of _Baba_ Tamara's contented snores. The old lady had wanted to see Irina onto the train, but Ros managed to dissuade her. _After all_, Irina said with a laugh,_ you'll be coming home in a couple of weeks yourself, Tamara Vassilievna. And I promise I won't get into any trouble before that._

_Just one more lie on top of all the others, _Ros thought wearily, shifting uncomfortably on the unyielding wooden bench as the train rattled back towards Moscow. She had left a small wad of roubles tucked under her mattress so that they would be found when the bed was folded away. _Baba_ Tamara was fiercely proud, and Ros knew she would be livid, but it was little enough recompense for having kept her neighbour safe for all these weeks – safer than the old lady would ever know.

About a half hour away from Moscow, Irina self-consciously asked a woman whose two children had been fidgeting, squabbling and making Ros wish she could strangle the bloody pair of them for the last hour, if she could borrow her mobile phone. With an ill grace the woman agreed, and Irina smiled her thanks, wincing as the little girl swung her legs with vigour and kicked her straight in the knee.

"_Da._" When she recognised Pyotr's voice she told him her time of arrival and asked whether he had bought the _dalnomyer_ for the camera. She wished he'd answered some other way than with a brief "_Da, vsyo normalno_". In Ros's experience the Russian phrase '_everything is normal"_ sometimes – but rarely - meant exactly that. It was usually more likely to be an attempt at evasion, and hearing it always made her hackles rise. Irina handed the phone back and offered 20 roubles for the call. The young mother wasn't _Baba _Tamara. She snatched the money with a scowl, and Ros went back to watching the countryside being steadily chewed up by the pre-stressed concrete teeth of Moscow's tower-block suburbs as the city slowly clawed Irina Selesnikova back into its grip.

Ros spent the ten days between her return to the city and her next scheduled drop getting Irina acquainted with her new life. Pyotr had brought her to another tiny one-room flat belonging, he explained, to a friend of his who was doing his military service in the Far East. Ros would have been much happier finding her own accommodation and keeping its location to herself. She knew Pyotr was reliable - all her drops had reached London, and, more importantly, Harry trusted him – but any information known by more than one person was no longer totally secret, and she still felt that there was a leak in the operational chain _somewhere._ But since she had promised Harry to obey orders, she buried her uneasiness and set out to find Irina some work. It took a humiliating week of being refused one menial job after another before she was hired to staff one of the tiny kiosks around the Leninski Prospekt metro station. When Irina confessed shame-facedly that her papers weren't in order, she was offered a starvation wage by the Azeri _biznismen_ who owned the kiosks in a tone of such contempt that it made Ros's blood boil. Irina, however, thanked him as effusively as if she had just won the lottery and nervously assured him that she certainly wouldn't '_go and get pregnant like the other slut did_'. The newspaper kiosk was a tiny wooden hut with just about enough room for one chair and one person; not for the first time, Ros was thankful for being so slender. Papers and magazines were laid out in tight overlapping rows on the counter, and displayed on every available inch of wall space, even dangling like a curtain over the window. Communication with potential customers was made through a slit that opened at the bottom of it, forcing both the client and Irina to stoop sideways and lay their head almost flat on the counter in order to see and hear each other. The sole consolation was that Ros could read to her heart's content between customers, and she avidly scoured the more literate newspapers for any reports – however brief or biased – from London. Fortunately, Fat Farid, as the Azeri _mafioso_ was universally known to his workers, didn't care who was actually manning the kiosk as long as it was open for fifteen hours a day, so Irina was able to arrange her hours with her colleague, a nervous little Tadjik implausibly called Marina, without interference.

On the day before the scheduled drop at Yaroslavski station, she did exactly that, and the following day Ros took the metro back to Komsomolskaya Square. It was one of the busiest places in the capital, filled, as usual, with a swarming, noisy, multi-ethnic mass of people. Somewhere in it, Ros thought, her contact must be watching for her; she had been given no details of where to pick up the intel this time, which meant that it had to be a brush-pass drop.

Irina walked into the station, and stopped before the enormous screen listing arrivals and departures. She gazed up at it, just one of an anonymous throng doing the same thing. The digital clock read 12.16. Irina checked her watch and turned slowly, scanning the heaving concourse as if she were looking for an arriving passenger, then, still pretending to search, began to thread her way slowly across it towards the rear exit from the station._ No need to stand there like Lot's wife. _

A sudden burst of shouting and scuffling made her whirl round. It took a second to identify the source of the disturbance - a gang of grubby, scruffily-dressed children, swarming through the crowds. Women were screaming as they tried to back away from them, men grabbing for bags and wallets. Before Irina could move, the gang was hemming her in, jeering and pushing her, their dirty hands plucking at her clothes.

_Bizprizorniye dyeti._ Unsupervised children, the Russians called them. Street urchins, washed away from their homes and families by the tidal wave of instability that had swept Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Irina shrieked "_Otstan! Otstan ot minya – Get away!"_ and tried to push them back. As she did so, she met the gleaming grey eyes of one of the biggest, and felt something shoved into her hand. At the same instant, her watch was torn from her wrist.

Ros thrust the packet – it felt like another flash drive – deep into her pocket as the gang swept on towards the exit. _Clever sod._ For the benefit of the audience – if there was one – Irina pushed back her sleeve, realised her watch was gone, and with a cry of anger, started chasing the children. They were running for the shelter of the railway yards behind the station, and as she sprinted after them a little girl turned and made an obscene gesture in her direction. Ros stepped up the pace and managed to grab her target, who was herding the others from the back, by the filthy collar of his shirt. Instantly, the other children turned as one, picked up stones from the railway line and started pelting her with them.

"You stop that now or I'll break his bloody neck!" she shouted. As the boy landed a punch in her stomach she kicked him behind the knees, and when he fell, straddled him and pinned him in position. A stone struck her painfully on the shoulder. "Tell them, or you'll be mincemeat!"

The boy spat out a stream of words, not all of which were known to Ros, but it was a fair guess that they weren't compliments. She shoved his head down lower.

"_Ladno, ladno._" He shouted to the rest of the gang to desist. Reluctantly, they obeyed, but many of them kept a handful of gravel at the ready. Ros hauled the boy to his feet.

"Right. I don't want to hurt you, you little toe-rag, but you and I are going to talk. Move." She frog-marched him over to a lop-sided Portakabin that looked abandoned, and pushed him down onto a broken block of concrete. "Right. You start. Who told you to give that packet to me?"

"Dunno." He wiped his nose on his sleeve. "Some posh geezer. Told me when and where, told me what you look like."

"Do you know him?"

He spat on the ground, missing her toe by an inch. "Yeah, course I do. He's my granddad."

The other children cackled and whooped. Ros fixed him with her iciest glare until he broke eye contact, then seized his wrist and wrenched his arm up behind his back.

"All right, wise guy. I said I don't want to hurt you, but that doesn't mean I can't." She jerked his arm up higher to emphasise the point, and he squealed. "Who is he? How do you know him?"

"Comes through here to work, don't he, on the train. He's a big shot; lives out in the country where all the rich lot have their _dachas_."

Ros gently increased the pressure. "What kind of big shot?"

"Uniform." He squirmed under her grip. "Like at the Lubyanka. Saw him once with some other bloke, called him Kuznetsov."

_Every third bloody Russian male is called Kuznetsov._ Ros pulled the boy upright and released his arm. He rubbed his shoulder.

"_Suka._ That hurt!"

"It was meant to." She jerked her head towards the other children. "This lot yours?"

"Yeah. So what? No law against it."

"There is against thieving." Ros sat down next to him, trying to ignore the stench of his unwashed body. "Did he pay you to do this?"

"Yeah. And that's not thieving. He said he'd pay me if I got that thing to you."

"And has he?" Now that they were talking more normally, the rest of the gang – six boys and three girls, all of them thin, dirty, and unkempt, had come closer and were listening.

"Not yet. Next time he comes through the station. Don't come every day."

Ros scrutinised his sullen, dirt-smeared face. "What's your name?"

He scratched at a sore on his leg. "Sasha. What's yours?"

"Ro - Ira." She pulled out her purse and counted out some notes. "I want you to give this friend of yours a message. Next time you see him, you tell him I want to meet him. Personally. Face to face. No little presents – I want his address so I can meet him there. You tell him he's going to be in a hell of a lot of trouble if he doesn't. Understand?" The boy might be dirty and homeless, she thought, but he wasn't stupid. There was a keen intelligence in his eyes. "And when he does, you pass that address on to me."

He pulled a face. "You going to tell me where you live, then? Want me to come for tea? Bring my friends?"

"Cut the comic routine," Ros snapped. "You know Leninski Prospekt metro station?"

Something flickered behind the grey eyes. "Yeah. My mum lives near there. Her and her boyfriend."

"Right." Ros told him about the newspaper kiosk and instructed him to bring the address to her there. Then she held the notes out to him. Sasha counted them and looked up, his expression crafty.

"I'm s'posed to feed the family. Lot of mouths."

Ros was about to tell him he had a big one and he should keep it shut, but then she looked more closely at the other children. They looked like something out of Dickens. All of them were shabbily dressed, none, as far as she could see, had coats, and two of them were barefoot. The little girl who had stuck two fingers up at her had a persistent cough. It was mid-September, and the nights and early mornings were already getting chilly. She glanced back at Sasha. He wasn't much older than Wes Carter and the three little boys who had befriended Irina in Artyomovo. _If he's got a mother, why the hell does he live like this?_

Cursing herself for a sentimental bloody fool, she – or Irina, she was no longer sure which - added several larger-denomination notes to the pile. Sasha stuffed the money into his trouser pocket.

"Dunno how long it'll take."

"Make sure it's not too long." Ros got up. "Or I'll be back here looking for you, and then you _will_ get hurt." The kids could just disappear with the money into the underbelly of Moscow, but Ros knew that like wild animals, they were territorial. It was unlikely that the gang ever moved far from Komsomolskaya Square. She went to check her watch and then remembered. A very adult smirk appeared on Sasha's face.

"He's got it." He pointed to one of the boys. "Borya! _Idi syuda!"_

"Never mind." Ros started walking away, but it was Irina Selesnikova who looked back over her shoulder at the little group and spoke. "You can keep the bloody watch."

She heard nothing from the child for almost three weeks. She passed the packet on to Pyotr. For the first time, it contained no reference to a future drop, leaving her in limbo, entirely dependent on Sasha to re-establish contact with Harry's informant. Ros's impotence made her edgy, especially since her clandestine reading of the papers made it clear, even allowing for censorship and propaganda, that relations between Russia and the UK were deteriorating fast. Connie had sent her a message emphasising the urgent need for her to set up the face-to-face meeting, and her general mood wasn't improved by the fact that the smell of winter was already in the air, bringing with it depressing memories of the last one. The sun was becoming an infrequent visitor to Moscow, and daylight seemed in a greater hurry to leave early with every day that passed. The temperature was dropping too, and Irina was fast discovering just how many cracks in the kiosk allowed the wind to insinuate its way in. Ros didn't want to contemplate just how cold it would be in there once the snow started to fall.

_I won't be here by then. Once I've met the contact Harry will pull me out. I'll have got what he needs._ She _had_ to believe that. The alternative wasn't a thought that she cared to entertain.

Reluctant as she was to go back to the site of a drop, Ros was on the verge of returning to Yaroslavski Station when she was stopped as she arrived at the metro station early one morning by a hiss of "_Ira, Ira!_" from behind the as yet unopened kiosk that served _shawarma_ and _shish kebaps._ Farid's cousin ran it, and it was by far the biggest there.

"_Ira!" _She glanced to one side and saw Sasha beckoning to her. Swiftly, Ros looked around, and then ducked behind the kiosk.

"Have you got it?" she demanded, keeping her voice low.

"Yeah." He fished out an envelope from his pocket and handed it to her. It was crumpled and filthy.

"You took your bloody time!" Ros ripped the envelope open. Inside was a single sheet of paper, with an address written on it. Underneath was written '_imminent operation'_ and in English, the word '_tranquility_'. She resealed the envelope, put it into her bag and pulled out her purse. "Good job." She frowned at the way the boy was hopping about. "What's wrong with you, got fleas?"

Sasha looked at her derisively. "Nah. S'cold."

Ros looked at him closely for the first time. It _was_ cold; it had rained during the night, and the air was damp and chill. She hadn't noticed that the boy was shivering and clutching his arms around himself for warmth.

"Didn't you say your mum lives round here? Couldn't you go and see her instead of wandering the streets all day?"

"Her boyfriend don't want me around. _Alkash._" Sasha jerked his head over his shoulder, and Ros saw the little girl from his gang squatting in the dirt. She was still coughing, and her teeth were chattering with cold. "Don't want my sister, neither."

_Shit._ Ros peered round the corner of the kiosk. Early-morning commuters were beginning to stream out of the station, and Irina should already be selling newspapers. The kid had done his job, and now she had the information she needed, both she and Irina had to go and do theirs. _You're not the bloody Pied Piper of Hamelin, Myers. _

"Give me five minutes and come to the back of the newspaper kiosk." She hurried to it, stopping at another on the way to buy three paper cups of tea and two large, jam-filled pastries. When the children arrived, she pushed both of them into the kiosk and locked the door behind them.

"Don't just bloody stand there," she said irritably to Sasha as they stood wedged side by side like three_ matrioshka_ dolls. "On the floor. Eat these - and the tea. Make a sound and I'll throttle you."

She doled out copies of _Izvyestiya_ and _Moskovskiye Novosti,_ trying not to tread on either child, trying even harder not to retch from the body odour they had brought in with them, and mentally cursing her memories of Wes Carter, whose face she saw every time she looked at Sasha. _You're an intelligence officer, not a sodding social worker._ The sooner she got out of this damned country the better, before the process of turning Ros Myers, The Hard Nut into Irina Selesnikova, The One With The Soft Centre, became irreversible.

When the kids had finished eating she gave Sasha virtually all the money she was carrying with her. Her funds from Adam, though already seriously depleted, would tide her over until she was paid. The boy stuffed it under his threadbare sweater.

"Maybe you're not such a _suka_," he said grudgingly. He pulled his sister to her feet. "_Poshli, Lara._"

They were gone before she could say anything. Ros finished her own tea and sold a few more copies of _Izvestiya._ Half the front page was given over to a vituperative article entitled '_Angliiskaya Razvyedka – Dyelo Penkovskovo'. Just what I need. _Ros remembered the case of Oleg Penkovsky, the GRU officer who had turned spy for the British. _Who doesn't?_ She also remembered that he had ended up with a bullet in his brain and his handler, Greville Wynne, in a Russian jail for eight years. She glanced at the tattered envelope in her bag. _I'll contact London tomorrow._ She pushed the copy of _Izvestiya_ and the fears of Ros Myers aside, picked up the latest copy of _Samaya_, Russia's answer to _Woman's Own_, and prepared to read herself back into the skin of Irina Selesknikova.

_**Thank you for reading! Please review. **_


	10. Chapter 10

Ros had firmly intended to contact Thames House first thing the following morning to confirm she had a green light for a face-to-face meeting with their informant. So she was exasperated, and then increasingly concerned when her phone, until that point a model of reliability, refused to make the connection. Ros was no geek, and, as Malcolm Wynne-Jones knew to his cost, she quickly became impatient with what she scathingly referred to as '_techno-babble_'. Nonetheless, the age of invisible ink and microdots was long gone, and all MI-5 officers had to do regular IT refresher courses. She extracted and examined the SIM card, checked the battery, and finally resorted to the old-fashioned method of cleaning the phone's entrails with a duster. Nothing changed, and she stared at the inert, uncooperative device in frustration.

_K chortu. Damn the sodding bloody thing_. She resisted the desire to hurl it at the wall. _I bet Malcolm would only have to bat his eyelashes at it and it would sit up and bleep. _She reassembled it, wishing she had listened more attentively to some of the IT specialist's patter. Then she might know if she had anything more serious to worry about. Because – and her fingers tensed involuntarily at the thought - if there were nothing wrong with the phone itself, the logical inference would be that something was interfering with its transmissions. And it wasn't likely to be British Telecom.

She was sorely tempted to go ahead and keep the meet anyway, and if she hadn't sensed that undercurrent of alarm in Harry's voice when she last spoke to him, she might have done. But that, and his anger with her previous failure to obey her instructions to the letter, stayed her. _I'll give it a couple of days. _She wrapped the phone tightly back into its protective plastic and returned it to its hiding place – shoved into the bottom of a pot on the balcony containing a half-dead geranium. The phone might not be intending to work today, but Irina had to.

Two mornings later, the mobile was still as dead as the proverbial dodo. Ros's increasing anxiety was making Irina uncharacteristically cutting and snappy as the submissive and nervous illegal immigrant found it increasingly difficult to subdue the tense and authoritative intelligence officer. Finally, Irina confessed tearfully to the bewildered little Tadjik who worked with her that she was worried about her old and frail Uncle Vanya with whom she couldn't get in touch. For a second, Ros almost smiled at the thought of Harry's expression if he heard that description. However unlikely it was, it seemed to reassure Marina, who gave Irina a hug and told her to go home early.

Ros turned automatically towards her flat, but after a few yards, she came to a halt, staring up at the pretentious massiveness of the Yuri Gagarin monument. She usually left the phone at home, but today she had brought it with her in the totally illogical hope that she might be able to will the damned thing to work. She moved into the shelter of the column's surrounding wall and took it from her bag. Still dead._ That does it._ Ros had flouted rules before, although she had never been reckless – that had always been Adam's prerogative. But she was going to be reckless now. She had the contact's address safely memorised. To delay any longer was more dangerous than to take the risk of visiting it. She turned decisively, and headed for the metro station.

In order to give herself extra time to check for surveillance, she got off a stop earlier than she needed to, at Okhotni Ryad, and ducked into the Alexandrovsky Gardens. Groups of Russian tourists up from the provinces, a symphony of dyed hair and cheap tracksuits, were waiting at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for the next changing of the guard. Irina walked briskly past. While the skill and precision of the ceremony was breathtaking, something about the robotic, blank expressions of the young Presidential Guardsmen always chilled Ros, and there were too many men in uniform in the area for her to want to tarry. Each time she saw an FSB uniform her pulse beat uncomfortably fast.

She was halfway across Kamenny Most, the bridge spanning the Moskva, when a muffled tinkling reached her ear. For an instant Ros thought it was the Spassky Tower bell chiming until she realised the sound was coming from her bag. She slowed her pace and first made Irina turn and lean on the bridge to admire the dazzling spectacle of the Kremlin, its gilded onion domes gleaming in the bright sunshine. She could feel no unwanted eyes, but she still glanced swiftly left and right. Only then did she slip the phone into her palm. The text message read simply '_URGENT. RING. CONTROL.'_

Ros forced herself to stand for a moment longer, gazing at Ivan the Terrible's pristine white bell tower. Then she pressed the phone's speed-dial key. Obligingly, as if the last three days of tomb-like silence had been a dream, it responded with the double ring-ring of an English telephone.

"Rangefinder," Connie James's voice said after three rings. Ros began to walk again. "We may have a problem. It seems the Russians know of your presence." Ros's mind darted immediately to Alexander Bychkov. _Tell me something I didn't know. _"Consider your operation burned and prepare to pull out."

For the benefit of an elderly couple approaching her, Irina crossed herself as she passed the huge, garish bulk of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour looming arrogantly over the other side of the bridge.

"Do you hear me, Rangefinder?"

"No. I'm on my way to the meet." She cut across Connie's exclamation of annoyance. "I'll go in quick and get out quicker. I've been told something's imminent. I've got the agent's code name, Tranquility; I'll have the rest in a matter of hours."

"Rangefinder, your orders are to _pull out_!"

"When I'm done." Ros stepped off the bridge and waited for the traffic lights to hold up the snarling steel river of cars. "Hold your nerve, Control, and let me do my job."

It was part bravado, and she probably wouldn't have said it if it had been Harry rather than Connie on the line. She could almost see the older woman bridling.

"St Andrew's Church," Connie snapped. "Exit papers and funds in the foot of the cross." The phone went dead again, and Ros hurried on across the Moscow Canal towards Malaya Yakimanka street. Harry would be livid with her, but she knew that her time was running out – Connie's last reference just emphasised the fact - and she was determined that if she were to have any chance of returning to the Grid then she wanted to earn it.

When she came within sight of the address she had been given, she scrutinised it from a safe distance. This was an affluent area, and all the doors had coded entrance systems, but after a minute Ros saw the door open and a uniformed officer emerge. As it creaked slowly closed behind him, she walked briskly past, flashed him a confident smile that was far more Ros than Irina, and ran swiftly up the stairs to the second floor.

She advanced cautiously, checking the flat numbers. The building had obviously been erected in Stalinist times; it had all the typical features, including gloomy, labyrinthine corridors haunted by unsettling memories of the past. It also carried the faint odour of cabbage soup and bad plumbing that was so ubiquitous in Russian blocks of flats that Ros sometimes wondered if a specification was inserted into the building plans.

She listened at the door for a moment, straining for any sound. The building was almost disconcertingly silent. She was about to ring when the door yielded slightly under her hand. _Shit. _It was open. Very gently, Ros eased it wider, slid through the narrowest crack she could negotiate and pushed it to behind her.

Despite the outside opulence of the building, the flat was surprisingly old-fashioned. Heavy curtains, still drawn, blocked most of the light, and the air was stuffy. A large oriental rug hung on the wall; a hangover from the time when most Russians lived in village _izbas_ and used them to keep out the draughts. As Ros edged tensely into the main room she saw the tenant sitting at a cluttered writing desk – or rather, slumped over it, with his head resting on a mouse mat. He might have been sleeping off the night before.

_Might have been._ Ros waited, counting to ten as she listened, letting her senses reach out into the rest of the flat. The air was still. So was her contact. Her fingers only confirmed what her eyes had told her as she sought in vain for the pulse in his neck, but the man's skin was still slightly warm. His last visitor hadn't been long gone. She scanned the messy desktop and riffled through the papers. As she straightened, she saw the reflected silhouette of a man in the empty wine bottle that stood at the informant's hand.

Without conscious thought she snatched it up, span round, and swung it at him. The man reeled sideways to avoid the blow, and Ros shoved him with all her strength. As he lost his balance and crashed in a heap into the corner she grabbed a fork from a dirty plate on the table and launched herself on him, stabbing indiscriminately at any exposed skin she could see. When his body at last stopped thrashing she scrambled to her feet, breathing heavily, and returned to the body of her contact. A swift search – conducted with shaking hands, although Ros refused to acknowledge that even to herself – revealed a memory stick hidden in his sock. She buried it in her inside coat pocket and looked around. Other than some smashed glass, a bent fork and an additional corpse, she had left no sign of her presence, and it was high time to remove that too. Time for Irina Selesnikova and Mother Russia to part company.

Back out on the street, she hesitated. There was a chill in the air now, but she felt colder than was actually justified by the temperature, and she was slightly dizzy, too. _Snap out of it, Myers! _This wasn't the time and it _certainly_ wasn't the place, for a ladylike fit of the vapours. Either she or this flat had been under surveillance. _If you stand here any bloody longer you might as well send a text to the Lubyanka and announce your arrival._ St Andrew's, Moscow's Anglican church, wasn't that far away, in the back streets off Tverskaya; it was within walking distance, but suddenly Ros's legs felt both heavy and weak at the same time. Nonetheless, she forced herself to start moving. For the first time since she had been mugged all those months ago, she had a suffocating and very real sense of impending danger.

She had reached the bottom of Kamenny Most when she saw the taxi rank. They were a rarity in Moscow, where parking was as anarchic as in any Italian city Ros had ever seen, but there were a few near the main tourist haunts. The taxi driver was reluctant to embark one of his compatriots, so for the first time since she had arrived in Russia, Ros switched to English. It had the desired effect, but immediately she had done so, she wished she hadn't; shedding the protective cover of Irina made her feel strangely exposed, and by the time she was dropped off at the church it was an effort to stop herself trembling. It hadn't helped that the driver had had to pass the British Embassy on Sofiskaya Quay _en route._ The temptation to seek the safety it offered from the threat she sensed was enormous, but Ros knew the safety was illusory. She was deniable. _On your own … no back up from us._ And anyway, if the FSB knew who she was, then she could easily be offered a Russian noose around her neck rather than a British helping hand.

When she walked into St Andrew's she silently thanked God that they had chosen it. She might still be in Moscow, but this was a tiny corner of England, and the church was blessedly free of the inquisitive, suspicious _Baba _Tamaras who populated every Orthodox church in the city. Ros went straight to the cross in front of the altar. _Religion, the opium of the people._ She remembered sardonically quoting that once to Zaf Younis, and the mocking twinkle in his eye as he retorted '_I thought that was football_'. She had got the last word – though God knows what she'd said. It had been spoken in another world … another life … by another person.

A muffled shout beyond the door made her jump violently and brought her back to the moment. Hurriedly, she reached underneath the cross. She was tired, and although she loathed herself for it, shaken by the killing - and losing concentration. The spectre of mistakes, and potentially lethal consequences, lurked in the shadows. It was time to leave.

She withdrew her hand, clutching a sizable wad of rouble notes and a British passport that she spared a second to examine. _Lindsay Butler._ It bore her photograph and a valid Russian visa with entry stamps. Ros got to her feet. The church clock had told her it was just past six-thirty. She wouldn't make Domodedovo by the time of the last flight out today. Like it or not – and she didn't – she would have to stay overnight and make her escape tomorrow. For now she had to get back to the flat. Irina Selesnikova was still intact, clear of any connection to the death of one – and possibly two – FSB officers, Ros Myers did not exist, and Lindsay Butler was merely a figment of London's imagination - until tomorrow. Get back there and she would be safe until then. She crossed herself – _a little puff of opium never hurt anyone _– and hurried out.

By the time she got to her building Ros was cold, exhausted, and had a blinding headache. The courtyard was poorly lit, and she was so focused on reaching her hideout that in the gloom she didn't see the two men sitting on a bench on the far side until the flare of a match drew her eye to them. She hesitated. It was dark, cold, and threatening rain. They did not look like your average Moscow _bomzhi _slumped in an alcoholic daze_;_ one, talking intently, seemed to be hectoring the other. She strained to see better through the shadows. As she did, a light came on in one of the ground-floor flats and illuminated the two men as if they were centre-stage in a Chekhov play. It was Pyotr's red hair that identified him. And despite the fact that he was in civilian clothes, the other man was unmistakably Alexander Bychkov.

For a second, the realisation pinned Ros to the spot. The blood rushing to her head made it pound savagely, combining with the shock to make it almost impossible for her to think straight, let alone move. As she stood, staring in terrified disbelief, Bychkov, like a monster in a child's nightmare, got slowly to his feet, and his head turned until he seemed to be looking directly at her.

The movement broke Ros's paralysis. Instinctively, she turned and fled back towards the main road, stumbling on the ruts and holes in the path, conscious of feet thudding behind her, but not daring to look back for fear of losing her footing. Her lungs were burning, and her breath coming in gasps when she reached Leninski Prospekt, but at least here she could see better.

_And so can he._ There were few pedestrians about, and the breadth of the avenue left her exposed like a prize exhibit in a lighted display cabinet. _Don't panic, Myers! Think! _Stupidly, she had run _away_ from the metro station. She would never get across the avenue before she was seen. She was about to run left when she heard a crackling sound from behind her. She glanced round. One of Moscow's ancient trolleybuses was grinding to a halt at a stop about thirty metres away, wheezing almost as much as she was.

Ros took another heaving breath, staggered towards it, and managed to haul herself up the steps just as the doors rattled shut. She grasped a pole for support, fighting to steady her breathing as the vehicle whirred into reluctant life and lurched away down the street. When it cleared the intersection and Ros knew she was out of Bychkov's sight, she slumped into a seat and closed her eyes.

She had no idea where the bus was going, but all that mattered at the moment was what it was leaving behind. She raked her hair back and rubbed her throbbing forehead. She could taste bile in her throat and the barrage of unanswered questions battering at her was intensifying her headache. She tried to adopt Irina's withdrawn, weary expression as she drove her exhausted mind to function with something approaching its usual sharpness. Even with a British passport in her pocket the embassy was too risky; Bychkov would surely have it covered. She could check into a hotel, but hotels kept records of all their guests. Briefly, Ros considered going to _Baba_ Tamara's, but that would involve explanations for Irina's sudden disappearing act. And even Ros Myers wasn't ruthless enough to expose an innocent old-age pensioner – especially one to whom she was already so deep in debt – to the risk of being arrested for espionage by the FSB.

_No,_ Ros thought. The only way was to return to the shadows that were the domain of the deprived and the dispossessed. She shuddered. During her flight from London she had spent time in a dilapidated anarchists' squat in Berlin, and lived briefly on the streets of Gdansk with a group of former prisoners. But that hadn't been in the – albeit early – Russian winter.

_Tomorrow I'll be out of here._ She resolutely drove from her mind the Bychkov-shaped question mark at the end of that statement. She - and the intelligence she carried - _would_ get out. She _had_ to. Somehow the operation had been compromised. There had been too many close calls. _It will only be for tonight._ _It's not as if you're taking up permanent residence like those poor sodding kids. _She looked out of the window as the bus came to a clanking halt at Oktyabrskaya metro station.

_The kids._ Oktyabrskaya metro station was on the circular line. So was Kievsky railway station, on Komsomolskaya Square. Suddenly, Ros knew exactly where she was going. Irina stood up, jumped off the bus and MI-5's mole slipped unobtrusively back underground.

_**Thank you, faithful, patient readers! Please review! **_


	11. Chapter 11

_** 'Chernozhop' is a Russian insult used to describe people from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and 'beloye' means white and is a Russian euphemism for vodka.**_

Komsomolskaya Square was still heaving with people despite the hour. With the darkness had come a sharper cold, and Ros diverted to the shops in the subway passages. They were little more than a series of tiny cubicles along the walls, each bulging with a bewildering range of cheap, shoddy goods. Once again, Ros reflected wryly, she owned virtually nothing, although at least this time she could lay claim to not one but _two_ false passports.

_Yeah, and neither will keep you warm tonight. _After some wheedling and haggling over the prices, Irina bought another plastic holdall, three blankets, and a motley assortment of woollen caps, socks and gloves. Normally, the rudeness of Moscow sales staff infuriated Ros, but this evening it was a godsend. The bored and indifferent young women manning the shops showed absolutely no interest in her or her purchases.

Irina hurried away, pursued by the lingering odour of urine and petrol fumes that hung like an invisible mist in the underpass. At the food stalls she bought some _pirozhki,_ a large bottle of Coca-Cola, _schchi_, the universal Russian cabbage soup, and a large bar of chocolate. A final stop to buy a set of cheap Chinese plastic plates and cutlery, and Irina heaved the bag onto her shoulder. As she did so, Ros half-turned, and in the process, scanned the street as well as she could in the gloom. She had jettisoned her phone, throwing it onto the Metro lines at the far end of the platform at Oktyabrskaya. She couldn't see how she could have been tracked here, but Ros no longer fully trusted anyone. _Someone_ had betrayed Pyotr to the FSB. Whoever that someone was – and Ros had spent most of the last hour despising herself for the nagging fear that it might be Harry Pearce – they had a direct line to Alexander '_good observer_' Bychkov. And she wasn't about to become the reason for his next bloody promotion.

As she moved round the side of the station towards the yards, she had to stop to adjust her eyes to the deeper darkness. The metallic clanging of wheels on rails and the melancholy whistle of departing trains were the only sounds now other than her own tense breathing. Twice she passed groups of down-and-outs huddled around makeshift fires, and once one of them lurched up and pawed at her as his companions jeered drunkenly. Ros would have floored him without hesitation; Irina cringed aside and broke into a stumbling run. She stopped when she reached the shelter of a shunting shed and stared around. _Shit. They could be anywhere._ She muffled a shriek, and shuddered in revulsion as a large rat scampered between her feet, but as she watched it vanish, a dim, flickering light in a railway carriage about twenty feet away caught her eye. She went closer.

"Sasha!" She kept her voice low in case of security patrols. 'Security companies' constituted one of the few growth industries in Russia, and most of their staff was ex-FSB. "Sasha!" No reply. Ros muttered a crude peasant curse that was one of _Baba _Tamara's favourites, and was about to find herself a solitary refuge for the night when a voice said: "What's the matter, need to send another note to your fella, then?"

Ros jumped out of her skin, swung round and saw Sasha smiling impudently not two feet from her elbow.

"You realise I could have knocked your head off, clever dick?" she snapped. Even in the darkness she saw the glint of mocking laughter in his eyes.

"You'd have had to see me first. So, you want a postman, then? It'll cost you."

"No." She hesitated. "Can you keep your mouth shut? Yeah, yeah," as Sasha made the universal gesture for cash with his dirty fingers, "I know." As he nodded, she said, "I'm in trouble. I need somewhere to hide." She was aware of the boy's grey eyes watching her shrewdly.

"We – ell, s'pose we can find a spare bed." He pointed at her bag. "What's that?"

"Food," Ros said tersely. "And warm clothes."

"Deal." He turned round. "Follow me." He led her to the carriage in which she had seen the light, and climbed up. Ros followed him in. At one time it must have been the _platskartni_, hard-class part of a long-distance train. The children had taken it over. It was dirty, smelt like a gymnasium changing room, and was only slightly warmer than outside. In the weak light cast by a few candles, Ros saw the rest of his gang looking at her with undisguised hostility. Irina turned to Sasha.

"Where are the others?" There were only two girls – one of them his sister – Borya, and another, smaller boy.

"Got nabbed by the police, didn't they." Sasha pushed a mouldy-looking blanket off a thin, grimy mattress and gestured that she should sit down. Irina did so, and opened the bag. All the children looked pinched with cold, and the two smallest were trembling visibly.

"They might help you, you know," Irina said. "This is no way to live, is it?"

Sasha scowled. "It's better than getting nicked. They'll put them back in a _dyetdom. _That's no way to live, neither – you don't get proper food, and they knock the hell out of you. I'm not going to no children's home. And nor is she," pointing at Lara.

Irina glanced at the two little girls, who looked ready to cry at the mention of the children's home. Borya was nodding fiercely in agreement. She dropped the subject.

"Are you hungry?" All of them except Sasha nodded, but Ros noticed that his eyes were fixed on the bag as eagerly as any of the others. She pulled out the food and said to him, "You're the boss. Share that out." She shook out the blankets and beckoned to Lara. "Come here. What's her name?" When the child whispered, "Natasha," she sat the two of them down and wrapped one of the blankets around them. Sasha doled out the food as she repeated the exercise with Borya and the other little boy, Alyosha. All the kids fell on the food as if it was the first they had eaten in some time; probably was, Ros thought. She saw Sasha watching her.

"Well, come on. You're cold as well." She draped the blanket around herself and held the edge towards him.

He looked down at his bowl of soup, a potato _pirozhok_ balanced perilously on the edge of it. "I'm all right." The red tips of his nose and ears belied his words. "You're hungry too."

Ros rolled her eyes. "Share and share alike. Isn't that what your bloody Communism was supposed to mean? Come _on_, you bull-headed little sod."

"Communism stinks," Sasha said as he finally consented to sit next to her. Ros took up a second spoon and dipped into the bowl, making sure she left most for him. _So do you, brother._ Silence fell, broken only by greedy slurping. She peered through the spider's web of cracks on the grimy window, searching for any untoward signs of movement.

"S'aright," Sasha said indistinctly through a mouthful of potato. "Police don't come here. They're only interested in screwing money out of people, and we got none. Chase us sometimes, but they've all got fat-cat big bellies, they get out of breath pretty quick." Lara and Natasha giggled. "What you done then, Ira?"

"Nothing you need know about," Ros said sharply. She handed out the remaining _pirozhki, _and dug in the bag. "Here." She handed him the bottle of Coca-Cola and started to break up the slab of chocolate. The children's eyes were out on stalks. Even Sasha fell silent while he chewed. Now that they were replete – a feeling Ros suspected they hadn't known for some time – the smaller kids' eyes were closing fast. She pulled out the clothes. "Get these on, _davai_."

Sasha's face darkened. "We don't need that stuff. We're not _chornozhopi _beggars_._ You can't bribe us." His tone was defiant. Ros ignored the racist slur and threw a pair of socks to Alyosha, whose bare feet were mottled with cold. Sasha glared at the little boy but Alyosha grabbed them anyway. The others, more concerned to be warm than with Sasha's scruples, scrabbled for a share of the bounty.

"You can be a hero if you want, big boss." Ros finished the distribution. "Anyway, you said – " she broke off as a tremendous, metallic crash from outside shook the carriage, and leapt to her feet, remembering, and cursing, that she no longer had her gun. It took her a second to realise that the whole gang was rocking with laughter. Sasha smiled mockingly.

"_Uspokoishsa, _Ira. Relax. It's the crane. In the freight yard. The operator likes his shot of _beloye _on the night shift. Dropped his load."

_Cocky little sod. _Ros glared at him, aware that her heart was thudding against her ribs and that she was angrier at her own panic than she was with Sasha. She stretched out on the mattress and wrapped the blanket round herself and her bag.

"I'm going to sleep." Under its protective cover she checked that her passports and above all, her roll of money, were still safe. Sasha could make the Artful Dodger look like an upstanding, honest member of society. "You sort yourselves out."

She heard Sasha blow the candles out and the children settling down. There was a draught coming through the broken window, and despite her coat and the blanket, Ros was still uncomfortably cold. She tightened her collar and pulled the blanket up over her head, but within minutes her feet were chilled instead. The mattress she was lying on felt damp, and it was so thin that she could feel the metal flooring digging into her spine. _If Bychkov finds you it'll be metal digging in the back of your neck, Myers. Stop being so bloody pathetic. _She was just shifting her position for the umpteenth time when something moved against her. Ros remembered the rat and bit her lip hard to stifle a scream.

"_Toyota Ira." _ She felt a wriggle. "_Tyotya Ira, we're cold._ _Can we sleep with you_?"

Irina pushed back the blanket and squinted. Lara was burrowing into one side of her and Natasha into the other.

_Aunty Ira. Shit._ The little boys in Artyomovo had called Irina that, too. _Her, yeah, all right. But I don't do kids._ Adam's attempts to introduce Ros to Wes had been an unmitigated disaster; in a complete reversal of roles, she had been too embarrassed to say much beyond inanities, and Wes had lost interest in her with a speed that had only deepened her humiliation.

_What the hell has this bewildering, maddening, wonderful bloody country_ _done to you, Myers_? With a sigh, she covered all three of them with the two blankets and put an arm round each child as they snuggled against her. _God knows why I bothered losing the phone. Bychkov will be able to find me just by following the smell in the morning._

_But he won't. And you'll soon be out of this._ The girls might be filthy, but their bodies were warming her too. The boys' quiet snores were oddly reassuring. Irina's eyes closed on what Ros devoutly hoped would be her last night in Russia.

She slept fitfully, woken repeatedly by unexpected noises, cramp, and the chill, and was awake when the early light started poking its way through the dirt encrusted on the windows. The children were motionless, blanketed humps. Very carefully, Ros eased herself free of the two girls, and Lara mewed a drowsy protest.

"I'll be back," Ros lied in a whisper. She checked her pockets, removed her bag with its few skimpy possessions from the holdall, and moved as silently as she could to the door. Out in the yard, the air struck bitterly cold, and for a few seconds Ros shivered uncontrollably until her body reluctantly adjusted to the lower temperature. She glanced back at the carriage, hesitated, and then looked at the thick wad of roubles left for her in St Andrew's. The remains of her stash had been in the flat, and she had to get to Domodedovo and then pay for her plane ticket. If she didn't have enough left, she'd be trapped.

_Those kids are trapped already. And they'll probably spend it on glue-sniffing anyway. _Ros moved away, but Irina stopped after a few steps and turned round, only to come face to face with Sasha. The blanket was wrapped around him like a Roman toga.

"You're not coming back, are you?" For once there was no disdain in his voice.

"No." Ros made herself hold those suddenly guileless eyes. For the first time Sasha looked and sounded like the vulnerable child he was. "No, I'm not. I have to go."

"You going far?"

"Yeah. Yeah, quite far." _Oh to hell with it. I'll find a way._ She extracted several notes from the wad. "You look out for the others. And I – I'll try to find someone to help you. Not the police. Someone I know. Deal?"

"Deal." He took the money and cuffed his running nose on the blanket. "You can get a taxi out there." He pointed. "Old Uncle Vova. Wears one of them funny white caps. He's not posh but he won't cheat you. Tell him I sent you. He knows me." As Ros nodded, he suddenly ran up to her and threw his arms round her waist, then just as suddenly hitched up the blanket and dashed away again, vanishing back through the early-morning mist and the carriage door like a chimera.

Uncle Vova was too intent on negotiating the viscous sludge of rush-hour traffic to want to talk, so Ros tried to brush the worst of the dust and dirt from her coat and tidy her hair to create at least some semblance of a Western traveller. She was thankful when they finally reached the MKAD, Moscow's equivalent of the M25, and headed south-east, the buildings giving way to rolling fields and the serried ranks of birch trees. The swirling exhaust fumes in the centre had made her eyes prick and water – or at least that's what she told herself, even as she knew they couldn't account for the difficulty she had in swallowing every time she thought of Sasha, _Baba _Tamara or Sergei Ivanovich. She glared at the haggard, hollow-eyed woman she could see in the mirror. _Irina's gone. _She would destroy her passport at Domodedovo; make it official. Irina wouldn't be accompanying Lindsay across the border.

Armed police were on all the doors to the terminal, but she wasn't stopped on her way to the British Airways desk. A languid blonde with an accent out of James Bond and a pout that Ros assumed was meant to be sexy but just looked tipsy, sold her a ticket on a flight leaving in four hours. With some of her remaining cash, Ros bought a small cabin case and a change of clothes. She emerged from the toilets looking, with luck, a bit less like someone who had spent the night on the floor of a railway carriage, checked in, and headed for the passenger-only area. Thanks to the Chechen terrorist threat – at least she _hoped_ it was thanks to that - the whole terminal was alive with security. Ros had already identified militia, OMON riot police and FSB officers, not to mention Border Guard troops, and she could feel sweat making her palms sticky. She offered Lindsay's passport with a smile to a granite-faced Border Guards officer who responded to it with a grunted '_Kuda_?'.

"London," she answered, and helpfully added her flight number. The officer speared her with another glare, and waved her through. Ros was just joining the queue for the passport control booth when an outburst of shouting erupted back beyond the barrier. Every head turned simultaneously. A young man was shouting, gesticulating, and struggling with the two militia officers trying to restrain him. Only snatches of his words were reaching the queue, and although others might have understood them, only Ros knew _exactly_ what they meant. The blood rushed to her head so fast that for an instant the hall swam around her. _Stop her … she's an imposter … a foreign agent … stop her … don't let her cross the border …_

"What the Dickens is that all about?" enquired a businessman in the queue behind her.

"No idea," Ros said, in as indifferent a tone as she could summon up. She moved to first place in the queue. OMON officers were rushing to help now, and shoving other passengers back away from Pyotr, who was still bellowing at the top of his voice and pointing towards the passport control booths.

"Drunk, I expect," a woman said scornfully from a few places back. "Probably seeing foreign spies instead of pink elephants. " Ros managed to join in the titters of appreciative laughter, even as she noticed one or two of the Border Guards manning the booths stand up to see what was going on.

"_Zhenshina._" A young female Border Guards officer patrolling the queue motioned her forward to a free booth. Ros walked briskly towards it, sensing out of the corner of her eye that the scuffle was now being brought under control, gradually inching closed her window of opportunity. She smiled at the officer in the booth and slid her passport across to him. She watched, apparently without interest, as he placed it under the ultra-violet scanner and tapped the keys of his computer. He repeated the exercise and then looked up, his face unreadable.

"There is an irregularity. Please stand to one side and wait."

Irina almost did timorously as she was told; just in time, Ros remembered that she was now a globe-trotting, sophisticated Westerner exasperated by the incompetence of Russian bureaucracy.

"An irregularity? What do you mean, an irregularity? My visa is current, it was provided by your embassy in London, and nobody said anything when I arrived. Look, I have a flight to catch, if you can't do your job - "

"There is an irregularity." Expressionless light blue eyes held hers. "Please stand aside. Someone will come."

Tutting with impatience, she stood to one side of the booth, looking ostentatiously at her watch. The businessman moved up and took her place, carefully not meeting her eyes. Lindsay Butler already had pariah status. No-one wanted to be contaminated by her offence.

_How the hell did Pyotr get here? Didn't Bychkov arrest him? If he somehow got away, why in God's name didn't he lie low? How much do they know?_ Ros kept her face impassive, but the questions tumbled through her mind like a cascading waterfall as the wait stretched on. _Time to create a bit more fuss. _She tapped on the window of the booth.

"Look, I can't wait here all day! Can't you get your boss to sort this out quickly?"

The Border Guard looked up angrily but as he did so his eyes flicked beyond her and his expression changed to one of deference. A deep voice spoke from over Ros's shoulder.

"I'll deal with this, Lieutenant." Ros heard the booth door open and close. Finally, she turned.

"Miss … Butler." Alexander Bychkov glanced down at her passport and then up at her. "There seems to have been a misunderstanding. Will you follow me, please?"

_Hope you enjoyed it. Please review! :)_


	12. Chapter 12

_('Shirokaya dusha' means 'broad spirit', and is the way in which Russians describe the typical Russian character as they perceive it - open, generous, warm and emotional)._

* * *

><p>"Allow me." He leaned down to take her suitcase. Ros held fast to the handle. <em>First rule of interrogation.<em> _If you give way on the little things, it will only be a matter of time before you give way on the large ones._ Bychkov's blue eyes narrowed a fraction, but his voice remained smooth. "This way, please."

He led her across the hall to an unmarked door and used a swipe card to open it, then stood back politely to let her in. Ros took the chair placed in front of the desk and was seated before he had rounded it. Bychkov unbuttoned his jacket and sat down. He flicked through the pages of her passport.

"Lindsay Butler, British subject." He looked up at her. "No longer Irina Selesnikova, Latvian reject and citizen of the Russian Federation, then?"

The room, Ros knew, was certain to be wired for sound, and possibly monitored. She shook her head.

"I don't know what this charade is all about, and I've never heard of Irina … whatever you said her name was." She was acutely aware of the memory stick she had taken from the body of their informer tucked in her inside pocket. "All _I _know is that you're making me miss my plane for whatever stupid bee you've got in your bonnet. I have an important meeting in London – _not untrue _– and if you - "

"I shall continue to call you Irina," Bychkov calmly overrode her words, "because this – " he waved the British passport and then slapped it down on the table in front of her, "this, excellent forgery though it is, is about as likely to be genuine as I am to be a card-carrying member of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Club. Not that I believe your real name to be Irina Selesnikova, either." The deep blue eyes bored into her. "If you object, of course, you have only to tell me your real name."

_Go to hell._ Ros didn't utter the words; she let the expression of bored contempt on her face and the impatient tapping of her fingernails on the desktop speak for her. Bychkov returned her look steadily and with such intensity that Ros felt the kind of discomfort she only otherwise experienced when she had to strip for medical examinations. Her mouth was dry and she wanted to swallow, but she knew the gesture would be noticed.

"Your - _colleague – _out there said there was an irregularity," she said angrily. "Would you have the common bloody courtesy to tell me what the hell it is instead of wasting my time weaving fairy tales?"

"Fairy tales," Bychkov said thoughtfully. "You do yourself a disservice, Irina Alexeyevna. I think you are far more skilled at telling them than I am." When she merely raised her eyebrows and gave an impatient sigh, he added, "You seem to have a particular _penchant_ for the Little Match Girl, for example. Lost children … that sort of thing."

_Here we go again. The ambiguous comments, the subtle probing._ Except, Ros thought, that he wasn't probing to find out information. That last shot had been far too pointed. He already knew; he was just waiting for her to confirm what he knew. _Wait on, you bastard._ She looked at her watch.

"I really don't have all day … Colonel? Can you kindly get to the point?"

"Major," he corrected dryly. "My rank is Major, as you know only too well. In Russian counter-intelligence … as you'll also be aware." He toyed with the passport.

Ros allowed Lindsay to show another flash of impatience. "The only thing I know is that my papers are in order, my ticket is valid, and you have _no_ _right_ to harass a British subject in this way!"

Now it was Bychkov's turn to shoot her an ironic glance. "You would perhaps care to have diplomatic representation? Would you prefer me to call your embassy?"

_You're deniable. Absolutely. You're on your own, black op, no back-up from us. _London might have provided her with a false passport, but those strictures still applied. She could be interrogated, detained at Bychkov's pleasure, and charged with whatever he chose, and nobody would help. The Grid wouldn't even know what had become of her. And he knew it.

"No, I thought not." The FSB officer shoved back his chair with a suddenness and a grating noise that made Ros jump. He went to a bookcase against the wall, and pressed a button set into it. Then he poured two glasses of water and brought one back to her. Ros ignored it, afraid that her hands would tremble, so he put it down on the desk in front of her.

"Did you hear a disturbance in the terminal while you were waiting in the queue, Irina Alexeyevna?"

She ignored the use of Irina's name, too. "I should think everyone in the damn terminal heard it. Another drunk, I suppose. One thing your country never has a shortage of. And you're bringing this up because - ?"

She expected a reaction to her increasingly belligerent tone, but Bychkov merely paced to the smoked-glass window and looked out. "I am bringing it up because I'd like to know if you heard what the man said."

"I've no idea what nonsense he was talking," she snapped. "I suggest you put him in one of your ubiquitous drunk-tanks until he stops. I fail to see the relevance of this."

"He was shouting," Bychkov said flatly, 'that you were a hostile spy and should be arrested to prevent you leaving the country. He has _been_ arrested, and is being held incommunicado on my orders. Ostensibly to prevent a breach of national security." He span from the window, took two strides to reach her and leaned over her, bracing himself on the two arms of her chair. Instinctively, Ros shrank back from him, but as she tried to turn her head away he seized her jaw and wrenched her sharply back to face him. "So you will _stop – _his fingers pinched her skin painfully hard – playing silly games of make-believe. This is not your gentleman's club in London, this is Russia, and you are not playing a nice game of cricket, you are playing hard to get with the world's most ruthless intelligence service. I know what you are, I know what you have been doing here, and your game is up unless you co-operate with me _right now._"

He straightened up. His eyes were blazing now, and incongruously, Ros remembered a sapphire pendant her mother had once owned; the stones had given off the same blue fire. Her jaw was throbbing; later it would bruise. She glared right back at him and said aloud what she had thought earlier.

"And you can go to hell." She spat in his face for good measure.

The crack of his hand across her face almost knocked her from her chair; it would have done if the Russian hadn't grabbed the arms to steady both it and her. Ros felt blood trickling from her lip. Before she could wipe it, Bychkov handed her a tissue. She dabbed at her mouth, keeping her eyes down to give herself time. _Drop the pretence._ It was obvious that the man knew everything except her name and job description. _Well, he's not getting those._

"Do you see that button on the wall?" Bychkov pointed to it. "It has switched off surveillance and recording in this room. Now, be honest with me. Your associate has betrayed you, Irina Alexeyevna."

"Because _you_ turned him!" Ros snarled. Her mouth was swelling rapidly, and the pain increased her anger. "I saw you with him, browbeating him … what did you do, use his family against him?"

To her indignant astonishment, Bychkov laughed. "There speaks a true intelligence officer. For that is what _you_ would have done, yes?" Again he bent low over her, and Ros, despite herself, flinched in expectation of another blow. "_Bozhe moi, _where does MI-5 get its recruits these days? I browbeat no-one – Pyotr Novikov came to _me_! His mother was on our files as an agent for London for almost ten years during the _zastoi_ years of the Soviet Union. This makes her a heroine, of course, in the new Russia. But the son … no. He is nostalgic … for the glory days he never knew. For the iron fist of Stalin, for the strong ruler. Now, he thinks we have one." He jerked his thumb towards the obligatory air-brushed photograph of an obsidian-eyed Vladimir Putin on the wall. "So, he continues Mama's heroic work for MI-5. And at the same time – he freelances for FSB."

_You're lying._ But even as she glared at him over the tissue she was still holding to her bleeding lip, Ros remembered her first meeting with Pyotr in Novodievichi cemetery. _He was a good man … he made us respected … even death has a price in Russia now. _And she recalled the bitter tone of his voice, which even then she had recognised herself to be genuine. _But it doesn't make sense. Why has this bastard waited this long to arrest me? Why didn't he put a stop to the operation before?_

She forced her swollen lips to articulate the words as defiantly as she could. "So why didn't you stop me? Pyotr passed the intelligence on to London."

"Not all of it." Bychkov sat down again. "Oh no, my dear Irina Alexeyevna, not all of it. Your Pyotr did not want his British paymasters to get suspicious, so he sent the least that he thought he could get away with. The rest - to me."

Like all Russian interiors in winter, the little room was grossly overheated, but Ros suddenly felt so cold that she shivered. What had Harry said? _I need you to persuade the source to agree to a face-to-face meeting at which you will get him to stop going three times round the mulberry bush and supply the information he's been promising. You will obtain the information … it is of crucial importance that you do. _At the time she had put his impatience and the urgency of his demands down to the bomb attack and deteriorating relations between the UK and Russia. _Chort vozmi._ _Could _it be? Had Pyotr been working for the FSB the whole time?

She looked up at Bychkov. _He could still be playing you. Letting you think he knows more than he does. Tricking you into admitting the rest._ But then he already knew enough to have her charged and sentenced - for espionage, illegal entry, murder... you name it.

_The rest - to me. _"And it was you who had Kuznetsov killed."

Bychkov shook his head. "No. My Service, yes. But I am not responsible."

"Well, good for you." Ros injected as much lacerating scorn into the words as she could. "So your hands are lily-white; nothing to disturb_ your_ night's sleep." She snorted derisively.

"You think so." She blinked at his tone, a disdainful echo of her own. "How do you think you survived so long, Irina Alexeyevna? I tried to warn you that you were in danger the night you were attacked, and you would not listen."

Ros's eyes widened. "How do you know I was - "

"_Listen!_" His fist thumped the top of the desk and Ros's untouched glass of water tipped over and spilled its contents all over her knees. "This time, for once in your life, please, no British arrogance, just _listen_!" Ros was so stunned she didn't even feel the indignation she would normally have felt at the insult. "You were inches from arrest at Tsaritsyno. That operation to take you was planned and executed without my knowledge. I found out about it and got there just in time to abort it. If I had not, you would be on a train going East by now, not a plane going West. And I can assure you the dirt and cold there would make your accommodation at Yaroslavski Vokzal seem like bridal suite at the Kempinski!"

This time Ros couldn't even give voice to the words '_how do you know about Yaroslavski Vokzal?' _Her mind was whirling in confusion and incredulity, the two smashing up against each other like waves in a flooded river, and drowning any attempt she tried to make at logical reasoning.

"And you escaped yesterday from your 'safe'- house – which was not at all safe – because I allowed you to. I was trying to frighten off your Pyotr. It seems I failed." He took off his cap, wiped beads of sweat from his hairline and looked at his watch. "We have no further time for this. Do you understand?"

Ros stared at him. "You – Kuznetsov. You knew him?"

"Time." Bychkov tapped his watch impatiently. "_Do you understand?"_

"Yes." Ros struggled to get a firmer grasp on the facts. They were so unlikely, so _impossible_, that the process reminded her of climbing up to the top of the haystack in Artyomovo; she felt off-balance and uncertain, and as she had been then, she was trembling and sweaty-palmed with pent-up fear. She finally managed to find the words. "You were … protecting me?"

"You and Valya Kuznetsov." There was weariness in his voice now, and sadness in his eyes. "Yes, I knew him. We were at the FSB training college together. Served together for many years."

"You knew he was - "

"Yes. He told me. I should, of course, have reported him. But I have doubts of my own," again he nodded towards the portrait, "and Valya told me why. Not all of it." He smiled wryly. "To protect me, he said." He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and removed an envelope. "I kept what Pyotr did not send to London. It is here. Take it. What Valya told me was bad. What he did _not_ tell me I think was still more serious. He took great risks to help London. You will make sure this gets there. But be careful." His eyes darkened. "Someone there is either indiscreet - deliberately - or incompetent." Ros said nothing. She wasn't going to give him anything, even now – _especially _when she agreed with him.

He stood up. "Now … Miss Butler. I have checked your papers and they are in order. An unfortunate misunderstanding. You must hurry or you will miss your flight. I will escort you to the gate."

Ros got to her feet, still so shocked that merely to stand up was an effort as the adrenaline drained from her system. Bychkov put a hand under her elbow to steady her.

"I am sorry to have hit you. You made me angry. It is not a very pleasant farewell gift. Roses perhaps would be better."

"I hate them," Ros said automatically. She did. Her name meant she had been hounded with the bloody things all her life.

"Ah." His eyes twinkled. "Then perhaps we forget the slap and the spit and just shake hands. Like the English." He extended his hand and Ros shook it. "I know you will do what must be done. Is there anything else _I _can do for _you_?"

Ros, her mind still in turmoil, was about to say no when she remembered. "Those kids at Yaroslavski. They're cold and hungry and they live like rats. If someone doesn't help them this winter they'll either freeze or starve."

"_Intereyesno_." Bychkov looked curiously at her. "You do not seem like a sentimental woman, not a _mamochka_ with a soft heart, but it is there."

Ros flushed. "I gave my word, that's all. And they helped me - and Kuznetsov."

"So, I will help them." Bychkov opened the office door and guided her across the hall back to the border control point. He waved aside two young female officers in uniform skirts too tight and heels too high, and escorted Ros straight to the booth for diplomatic passport holders. When the officer manning it had saluted him, given Lindsay's passport a cursory glance and waved her through, he said politely, "A pleasant flight, Miss Butler. My apologies for the misunderstanding. We hope to see you in Russia again soon."

Ros waited in a daze for the flight to be called, barely hearing the unremitting buzz of trivial airport conversation all around her. When the British Airways ground supervisor informed her that she had been upgraded to business class, she found she was too drained even to ask why, but she was grateful for the empty seat beside her own. As the plane roared into the crisp, blue winter sky, she watched the tower blocks in which Irina's life in Moscow had begun passing underneath it like so many dominoes. Somewhere, in one of those faceless slabs, was _Baba _Tamara, perhaps still wondering what disaster could have befallen her _lapochka._

"Miss Butler?" When she didn't respond, the stewardess tapped her on the shoulder. "Miss Butler?" Ros stared at her blankly. "Would you like an aperitif? Wine? Gin and tonic, perhaps? "

"I'm not … thank you." Ros asked for a glass of vodka and caught the well-trained young woman's fleeting expression of surprise. _She'd be even more surprised if she knew why I need one._

"Would you like anything else?"

"My coat … I'm a bit cold." An insidious chill seemed to have wormed its way under her newly purchased leather jacket. "It's in my case." Twice, despite being addressed in English, she had started to respond in Russian. The stewardess handed her the coat, still dusty and creased from having been slept in the previous night, and moved on. Ros gulped the vodka in one, draped the coat over herself and felt something move in the pocket. She thrust her hand in, pulled the object out and found herself staring at Irina's watch, the one that Borya had stolen from her.

The alcohol had burned its way down her throat; now Ros felt her eyes smarting too. _That_ was the final straw. She pressed her face quickly against the window as the tears spilled over. This time it wasn't just a moment's weakness; this time, and for the first time that she could remember in years, Ros Myers was really crying, shuddering with the effort of keeping her sobs silent and unnoticed by the people around her. She pulled the coat up higher to shield herself, furious that she couldn't contain the sudden overwhelming emotion.

_You do not seem like a sentimental woman, _Major Bychkov had said. She had seen the genuine perplexity in his eyes. _No, I am _not. Was_ not, until your damn country got into my bloodstream, infecting me with your bloody Slavic 'shirokaya dusha_'. In one form or another, Russia had been the enemy of her own country throughout most of her professional had fled there _because_ it was. In the envelope she carried lay proof of hostile Russian intentions against the UK, and she had had to kill an FSB officer to stop him killing her. But it wasn't those things that brought the tears. It was that little old lady hugging her frightened, friendless neighbour, the kindness of the man who had patiently shown his hapless, incompetent farm worker how to do the simplest tasks and praised her with a beaming smile when she finally got them right. And the shivering, abandoned little boy who had thanked her in the only way he could, by returning her watch.

Ros heard the rattle of the meal trolley, hastily reclined her seat, and closed her eyes. Her stomach ached with hunger – she had eaten very little for two days – but she didn't want her distress to attract the attention of the stewardess. And exhaustion from her broken night, emotion and the stress of her escape was washing over her. As her eyes became heavy and her awareness began to recede the last thing she heard was the brisk, laconic British voice of the pilot.

'_Ladies and gentlemen, some flight information for you. We have just left Russian airspace …'_

_**Thank you for reading. This chapter ran away with me a bit, so there will have to be another one to wind things up! Please review **_


	13. Chapter 13

When the plane landed, Ros cleared customs and headed straight for the taxi rank. As ever, the terminal was heaving, but her year-long immersion course in counter-surveillance in Moscow had honed her skills razor-sharp, and she spotted the squat, burly man in a dark suit following her. _Shit._ There had been no tail on the plane, but she'd certainly grown one now. She stopped to buy a British Legion poppy and pinned it to her jacket - as defiantly British a symbol as she could find – and the man stopped too. _Bastards. _Now she'd have to shake them all over again.

She hadn't expected Thames House to be rolling out the red carpet for her, but it still hurt when Connie ordered her to stay away because '_things are a bit tetchy with the Russians'. _Ros wanted to retort that she could teach them all a few things about Russian tetchiness, but instead she managed to cover her reaction up with a sardonic "_Charming_'. Her patience ran out after a vastly expensive hour of giving her tail a Magical Mystery Tour of London, and she rang again. This time Connie, strain pulling at her normally cut-glass tones, told her of the imminent attack.

"Have you got a team at the attack site?" Ros snapped. She hesitated. "Is it Adam?" She could hear the change in her own voice; suddenly it was pleading, rather than demanding. No reply. "Connie, is it Adam?"

When Connie, with obvious reluctance, finally said yes, she bolted from the taxi and walked swiftly towards Guildhall Yard, drawing the barrel-chested little Russian after her like the ribbons on a kite. In the split second when he was unsighted, she dodged behind a pillar, and almost smiled as she recalled _Baba_ Tamara's '_takaya khudenkaya'_ in the _banya_ at Artyomovo. Sometimes, being 'so skinny' was just the ticket. When the Russian rounded the corner, she launched a vicious kick into his spine and floored him. That same slightness should have allowed him to fight her off, but his bulk was mostly flab. Ros was driven by her burning need to reach Adam, and her accumulated rage against Pyotr, Dima Latyushkin, Fat Farid, and the system that had discarded little Sasha and his friends like so much unwanted garbage. She left the FSB man groaning on the ground and vengefully crashed the gears of his car as she roared towards the bombers' target.

She could hear the clergyman reading prayers at the war memorial as she ran towards the church, looking frantically around her for signs of hostile or suspicious activity. _Nothing._ The church bell rang the quarter hour as she re-emerged from the garden into the street. It being Sunday, the City was almost deserted, but there were two cars parked one behind the other. The black one was skewed at an angle, its doors gaping open like the wings of a preening bird. The boot of the white had been raised, but now it lowered, revealing the man behind it, and Ros caught her breath. Suddenly time, which had been tumbling at a breathless speed towards eleven o' clock, slowed almost to a halt. Every extraneous sound seemed to have ceased; there were just the two of them, enclosed in a protective bubble of intimacy and silence that she was almost afraid to break. When she spoke, her voice sounded tentative and awkward like a shy teenager on a first date.

"Adam."

He looked up. "Ros!" He sounded stunned – as well he might – and the radiant smile that spread over his face combined joy, amazement and disbelief, like a child opening a parcel on Christmas morning to find the present they longed for but never really expected to receive.

She had a flippant retort all ready – '_Yeah._ _From Russia with love_' - but even as she moved towards him his features tautened again and he spoke first, pointing to his left.

"Tranquility's that way." He opened the car door.

It was an order, not a suggestion, but for the first time in her career, Ros Myers didn't move instantly to carry it out. She had lived for so many months with the aching loneliness that had filled his place in her heart, fought so hard to drive her longing for him from her mind; for a few seconds longer she just needed to look at him, drink him in, reassure herself that this time his presence wasn't just part of a precious dream which would fade when she woke.

The slam of the car door jerked her back to the immediate threat. As the engine caught, she turned and darted up the steps that Adam had been indicating. Turning around the back of the chapel, she saw a man in a dark overcoat wrestling a woman to the ground, shouting something she didn't catch, trying to prise the woman's jaws apart. Just as she reached them he rocked back on his haunches, his face twisted in fury and despair.

"Too late._" _The words came out through gritted teeth.

"I hope not." Ros looked down at the woman's body, and then at the man who had been trying to subdue her. "Is that Tranquility?"

His brow furrowed. "Maybe." He gave her a hard stare as he got to his feet. "Who the hell are you?"

Ros bristled at his tone and returned his glare with interest. His sickly pallor suggested prolonged lack of access to fresh air and sunlight. His face was drawn, and she noticed that his clothes hung on him as if they were tailored for a much bigger man, but his vivid blue eyes, though hollow, were alert and suspicious.

"What's your name? Who _are_ you?"

_Rangefinder. Irina Selesnikova. Lindsay Butler, British subject. An unknown woman returning from the dead. Take your pick._

The words felt unfamiliar from lack of use. "Myers. My name is Rosalind Myers. SCO, Section D." She added sarcastically, "Perhaps you'd be so kind as to reciprocate … if it's not too much trouble?"

He shrugged. "Lucas North. I used to work in Section D. Long time - " He broke off as the roar of an explosion tore through the air. For what seemed like an eternity both of them stared wordlessly at each other. Then he pressed a button on his mobile phone and raised it to his ear. Ros watched him, taking slow, deep breaths to keep her growing terror in check. She couldn't hear all he was saying for the sound of her own heart thudding in her ears and a babble of voices from the Remembrance ceremony behind them.

"Malcolm, did he make it?" His voice was hoarse and roughened by tension.

He listened in silence for a moment, then lowered the phone and swallowed hard, giving Ros the answer even before he spoke.

"Adam Carter is dead."

Ros wasn't conscious of having moved, but he sprang forward and grabbed her arm. "Steady." He braced her as she swayed. "Here - "

Ros wrenched herself free and took a few paces away from him. He looked at her uncertainly, and then up at the sky. She followed his eyes and saw the towering, swelling plume of oily black smoke from the explosion billowing up from behind the surrounding buildings.

"Did you know him?" She didn't answer. "Look, I – I think you ought to sit down for a minute – "

Ros heard a trace of Russian accent clinging to the edge of his words, and in a way for which she would later feel guilty and ashamed, professional instinct temporarily nudged aside shock.

"Who told you about Tranquility?"

She saw a fleeting expression cross his face that could have been hurt but might also have been anger. "Harry told Adam," he answered. "And Adam told me. Harry ordered me to try and get the disarm code out of her. "

Ros nodded mechanically, distracted by the sirens that were beginning to wail steadily as emergency vehicles raced into the City. Everything about Lucas North unsettled her, but her mind was too sluggish with shock to investigate him now. She knew she ought to be doing something – evacuating the people attending the wreath-laying ceremony from the area, getting in touch with the Grid, taking control – but instead, she just stood there, watching mesmerised as the smoke from the explosion drifted, scrawling the only farewell she would ever get from Adam Carter across the sky.

She became aware of Lucas's blue eyes scrutinising her intently, and for a few seconds confusion clouded her mind like the smoke, blurring them into Alexander Bychkov's as he searched her face, probing her mind, trying to disentangle the thread of her truth from the web of Irina's lies.

"If you're sure you can cope …" Lucas sounded doubtful, "Harry said he wants you to come into the Grid. Straight away."

Just a few short hours ago Ros would have been overjoyed at those words. Now they were hollow, much of their meaning blown to smithereens with the bomb-laden car … and its driver.

"You _did_ know him, didn't you?" This time Lucas's hand moved lightly to her back. "I'm sorry." She flinched and shook his hand away. As it fell, his sleeve slid up, showing a tattooed double row of links inked around his arm, and Ros froze. She had seen a design like that before, and she knew what it stood for. Dima Latyushkin, the owner of the _Zolotoye Koltso_, had one too.

"Give me your phone." She rapped the words and held her hand out. "_Give_ it to me!" when he hesitated.

"Yes, Lucas." When Harry answered, his voice sounded as if it belonged to the man Irina had described to her Tajik workmate a few short days and a lifetime ago - old and frail. Ros felt a huge lump swell in her throat.

"It's Ros." She lowered her voice, but kept her eyes on Lucas North, who had moved to talk to a pair of CO19 officers who had just charged into the square. "Harry, this man has a Russian prison tattoo - "

"It's all right, Ros, you can trust him. It's a long story, but he's one of us." There was a pause. "Did he tell you - "

Ros nodded. "Yes." It took a momentous effort to produce the single word.

"I'm sorry, Ros. This is no homecoming." Another pause. "I know how hard it will be for you."

Ros turned her back on Lucas and gritted her teeth to keep her composure. "I'm fine, Harry. Just tell me what you want me to do."

" CO19 should be with you shortly. Do what he would have done, Ros. Finish the job for him."

Ros swallowed hard. "I will. I –I've got intel you need to know about, Harry … from Moscow."

"Yes." There was a world of weariness in his voice. "I'll debrief you myself, now that - " He stopped abruptly.

_Now that Adam's dead. _Suddenly, hatred of an intensity that Ros wouldn't have believed possible flared up inside her like a wildfire.

Harry coughed. "Get here as soon as possible, Ros. For Adam's sake we're not going to let the Russians get away with this. We need you here. _I_ need you."

_And I need to be there. _Ros clicked the call off and returned the phone to Lucas North. He gave a twisted smile. "Do I get the seal of approval?"

Instead of answering, Ros pointed at the tattoos. Without realising it, she spoke in Russian.

"_Za reshyotkami? _You were in prison?"

A shadow passed over his eyes. "Yeah, for a while. Do you know Moscow?"

"I arrived from Russia this morning," Ros said shortly. _But not with love. Not now. Without it. _Again she felt the treacherous burning behind her eyes, and a sense of loss struck her so hard that for a second everything slid out of focus. She leaned against the wall for support. _Finish the job for him. Do what he would have done._

"Look," Lucas's voice said uncertainly, "if you don't feel up to it, I can sort things out - "

"No!" That gave Ros the strength to stand straight. She hadn't lied, fought and killed her way out of Moscow in order to have her place usurped. "I know what needs to be done. I'll do it." She pointed to the body of the bomber. "Call an ambulance. Get that taken away. I'll evacuate them." She gestured into the churchyard, and added to the CO19 officers, "Myers, MI-5, Section D. Secure the immediate area and check for any further devices."

Concentrating through the tightness that was constricting her chest, tamping down the scream of agony that might have relieved it, she evacuated the people at the memorial service quickly and efficiently. _Don't think. Get on with your job. You owe it to Adam. _

A CO19 officer thudded up the steps towards her.

"Area secured," he said tersely. "It's clear. I've dispatched a forensic team to Finsbury Square."

"Thanks." Ros nodded abruptly. "Harry'll be in touch." The officer returned her nod and disappeared.

Ros stared down at the poppy wreaths strewn the ground. The breeze lifted papers abandoned on a lectern; they fluttered off and slid close to her feet. Mechanically, she bent to pick them up.

'_In Flanders Fields'. Of course. _Ros had learnt the words by heart at school, years before, but they had never spoken to her so distinctly before. '_We are the Dead. Short Days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow. Loved and were loved …' _They blurred in front of her eyes, and angrily she threw the sheets to the ground.

_Take up our quarrel with the foe. _That was what Harry meant. And it was what she'd come back to do. The thought of being able to go on doing so had sustained her throughout the months of privation and isolation in Russia. But even in her worst nightmares she hadn't expected to be doing it without Adam.

"Er … Rosalind." She turned sharply. Lucas North was standing awkwardly a few feet behind her. "They've taken the body. There was a mobile." He held up a sealed plastic bag containing it.

Ros nodded curtly and took it from him. "Where's your car?" as she remembered that she could hardly use the one in which she had arrived.

"Out there." He pointed, and added hesitantly, "But Adam had the keys."

"Then we'll get a cab." She led the way swiftly down the steps, forcing him to hurry to catch up with her.

They made the trip without speaking; the taxi-driver gave up attempts at conversation after Ros rebuffed him twice. The radio was giving an update on the explosion – _a failed terrorist attack, thwarted by the security services. _The Home Secretary was interviewed and gave assurances that the government would find and punish those responsible. Ros's hands clenched. _I'll find them, Adam. Whatever it takes, I'll find them. _As a Russian Embassy spokesman strenuously denied any involvement by his government she heard the hiss of Lucas North's sharply indrawn breath and glanced sideways at him. The colour had drained from his face and his hands were trembling.

_That voice means something to you. _She remembered Alexander Bychkov's warning. _Someone in London is either indiscreet … deliberately … or incompetent. _Lucas North met her eyes for a second and then hastily looked away.

Ros told the driver to stop at Millbank – asking to be dropped at Thames House was rewarded with a week buried on filing in the paper archive – and they walked the remaining hundred yards. The last time she had seen the building – on a flickering, grainy Russian TV screen in Artyomovo – had been the real beginning of her journey back to London; of Irina's journey back to Ros. In the most painful, literal sense now, it had been a lifetime ago.

Harry Pearce was standing in the hall, just beyond the security checkpoint. He murmured something to the officers on duty, and Lucas and Ros were waved through. The lines on Harry's face looked as if they had been carved by a master sculptor, but he managed a wan smile.

"Ros. Welcome home."

Ros nodded a silent acknowledgement. She didn't trust her voice enough to risk speaking in front of Lucas North. Harry glanced at the younger man.

"Lucas, would you go on up to the Grid, please?"

Ros saw his face twitch, but he obeyed. When he had gone, Ros drew Bychkov's envelope and that last memory stick from her jacket.

"There - there are … other things. Things I need to tell you."

He nodded. "We'll do the debrief tomorrow, Ros. I have to go and see Wes now. Tell him about his dad."

Ros swallowed. "Would you like me to go with you?" She watched Harry assimilating the question and its unspoken, real meaning, the one she would never say out loud. _Please don't leave me alone with this._

"Of course." He touched her shoulder briefly. "I'll be glad of the company, Ros." He guided her up the corridor towards the lifts. "He so nearly made it. That's the worst of it. He was _there_. Almost out of the car. Ten seconds more and he - " he stopped as she gasped audibly. "Ros? What is it?"

"Nothing. Nothing. He – he what? Adam."

"I said he was just an inch from safety. That's all he needed. Ten bloody seconds."

His voice seemed distorted, bouncing off the marble floors of the hall. _The ten seconds I took away from him. The ten seconds when he was looking at me. The ten seconds when I distracted him from the job in hand because I wasn't concentrating on it myself – I was so selfishly, thoughtlessly desperate to see him. Oh, God. _

"Ros." Harry's hand was warm, strong and supportive in the small of her back. "We'll get revenge, I promise you. You've brought us the information. Whatever else the Russians have planned, we'll stop it. We'll make sure his death means something."

_Yes_. That was also the only way to make sure that her own life would, now. And for her own sanity, Ros knew she would accept it eventually. But for now the polished, gleaming surfaces of Thames House seemed to be dissolving around her. She was back in Moscow, with Irina, staring at the desolate, rainswept city. _What have I done? God, what __have __I done?..._

_**THE END**_

To all those of you who have reviewed so faithfully for the last 13 chapters, thank you so much; I really do appreciate it. To those who have read without reviewing – I hope you enjoyed the story. To anyone who would like to leave a final review now it's done … please press the button! :)


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